The “consensus” view among atheists seems to be that atheism is reasonable and that religious beliefs are not.
So why are atheists angry at God?
We can become incensed by objects and creatures both animate and inanimate. We can even, in a limited sense, be bothered by the fanciful characters in books and dreams. But creatures like unicorns that don’t exist ”that we truly believe not to exist” tend not to raise our ire. We certainly don’t blame the one-horned creatures for our problems.
The one social group that takes exception to this rule is atheists. They claim to believe that God does not exist and yet, according to empirical studies, tend to be the people most angry at him.
I’m trying to remember the last time I got angry at something which did not exist. It’s been a while since I last played World of Warcraft, but that might be a candidate.
But atheists angry at God? That’s absurd. Assertions that there are empirical studies to that effect? Simply ludicrous. By definition, atheism is a lack of belief in God or gods. It is simply a matter of logical impossibility that atheists should be angry at God.
I agree, but you need to understand the history.
Originally government registration was seen as a protection for religious nonconformists like me against the majority faith. Just like birth certificates was a response against baptismal records.
That was a mistake on our part. We nonconformist Christians should have simply born the persecution and left the government out of these kinds of personal matters.
Now we have the chance to remedy the missteps of the past but it looks as if we are just repeating the same old mistakes. Pity we never seem to learn from history.
peace
petrushka,
That’s a good point. I think that you and I are coming at the whole question of religion in public from very different experiences. I’m coming at the whole problematic from a perspective informed by a life-time in liberal Judaism, which does not proselytize, which is strongly committed to social justice, and which strongly supports secular laws and policies. It’s worked out well for me (for the most part) so I regard it as a healthy kind of religiosity (for the most part). And support for secular laws and policies is fully compatible with a deep sense of Jewish spirituality.
It’s a very different kind of religiosity than what one will find in most Christian denominations, and even more different from what one will find in the kind of Christianity that predominates in the south-eastern United States.
As for Dawkins, Harris, et al. I accept the point that they have done some good in the world by encouraging atheists and agnostics to come out of the closet. I just wish that their books were better, that’s all.
How would you remedy the missteps?
Never mind that, what are the mistakes?
🙂
It’s pretty simple. Get the government out of the marriage business entirely.
If adults want to enter into contracts with any one for any reason whatsoever. That is their business.
That goes for siblings or groups of any configuration.
peace
Not necessarily. It depends on what who one thinks the laws were for. In Judaism, the laws are regarded as binding on Jews alone. Not even the most devout Orthodox Jew thinks that the laws are binding on Gentiles. And of course “redemption from the Law” is absolutely central to Paul’s understanding of Christ, which is why the laws of the Old Testament aren’t binding on Christians.
Personally, I share Spinoza’s view that the laws of Torah are the laws of the Israelite state and have no pragmatic force since the Israelite state no longer exists.
What I get from the Hebrew Bible (and the millennia of re-interpretation by rabbis!) is the I-Thou encounter, not any specific code of conduct. The rabbis of liberal Judaism who have influenced me over the course of my life regarded the 613 commandments of Torah as customs and conventions that make one Jewish, rather than divine commandments. We think of the I-You encounter as the true meaning of Mt. Sinai, and the laws are basically window-dressing.
Personal story, perhaps of no interest to any of you: several years ago, I asked my rabbi to organize a reading group in our synagogue on Harris’s The End of Faith. The main thing we were interested in is responding to his criticism of religious liberals. I was quite surprised to hear my rabbi say that he’s basically a neo-Kantian in the tradition of Hermann Cohen, and that the symbols of Judaism are for him just emotionally comforting ornamentation. (Though my rabbi, unlike Cohen, is a passionate Zionist. We had a lot of arguments about Palestine.)
It’s not as simple as that however, is it?
For example, should a hospital run by the religious allow a same sex partner to visit their dying spouse when it’s relatives only allowed? Are they a relative if their marriage is not recognised as valid by the people who run the hospital?
So if the government does not insert itself into “the marriage business” that person will have to die alone? Would you, do you support that?
So you are pro-incest? Is that a biblical thing?
😛
It no more matters that Dawkins and Coyne are unsophisticated than it matters that some gays are unsophisticated.
Yes, that has been my experience.
My guess is that most of my colleagues were irreligious. But I don’t know for sure. It just never came up.
I see your point, in terms of getting non-believers to come out of the closet, but I still want to say it matters that Dawkins and Coyne don’t have very good arguments. But maybe it doesn’t matter, really?
I don’t see that a philosophically “good” argument is called for.
I think philosophers and theologians load words way beyond their carrying capacity. Words, however sophisticated, are not evidence. Evidence is evidence.
I don’t care what you believe. I find belief to be excruciatingly boring. But assertions of historical fact need to be investigated if they become the basis of secular laws. If you are hanging or imprisoning people for buggery, it matters whether God dictated laws to Moses or whether someone made it up.
In a free country a hospital and a prospective patient are both free to act according to their conscience. It’s seems pretty simple to me.
Do you think a hospital run by a secular charity (If there was such a thing) should be forced to perform a female circumcision on a Muslim girl in Yemen if that is her parents desire?
Do you think the same secular hospital in Utah should be forced to preform fertility treatments on a thirteen year old bride of the Prophet of a Mormon sect?
I would much rather let a Private Hospital set it’s own rules and deal with objections in the courts on a case by case bases.
As a general rule It is never a good Idea to expand the governments power at the expense of the people.
peace
Not anymore than being in favor of contracts for homosexuals makes me pro-sodomy
peace
But it is often a good idea to expand the government’s power to protect a minority against the tyranny of the majority.
I agree but that is not what is happening here. The majority is in favor of redefining marriage.
peace
Losing powers held for thousands of years really sucks, doesn’t it?
Yes, and I live in a blue state but I could still get fired merely for being out as an atheist. There hasn’t been “safe passage” for nonbelievers in my country during my lifetime. I was an atheist before I knew there was a word for it — I’ve mentioned before that while I was a child I assumed everyone at our church was just going along with belief the same way adults always pretended to believe in Santa Claus to make the kids happy — when I became an adult myself and realized that everyone took that garbage seriously, I was terrified. I was insulated from the worst of the consequences since we weren’t raised in a fundie church so my folks didn’t have to shun me. But I have never been so grateful for the spotlight of popularity to shine on anything so much as on the Four Horsemen.
Finally, there was open discussion about how sensible and appropriate it is to be a non-believer. I don’t think it’s surprising that, about the same time, polls started showing a measurable jump in the percentage of people who self-identify as “none” regarding religious affiliation. Reading Dawkins and hearing Hitchens didn’t change my overt behavior (as far as I recollect) but clearly it did change some other folks’ behavior as they suddenly decided it was time to come out as atheist. Hooray for that!
It’s only human to not want to be one out of ten thousand standing up against the dominionists. It’s much safer to be one out of ten or so. Contra the christians’ ridiculous self-important narrative of persecution, it’s still a frighteningly one-sided struggle; they still have the population numbers on their side and they still control all the major media plus all levels of US government (including the corrupt catholic Supreme Court), not to mention the increasingly theocratic governments of most 2nd and 3rd world nations. But finally there is some hope that people won’t have to admit to being non-believers as if admitting to some mental illness or satanic curse. We’re your friends, neighbors, coworkers, and we’re quite normal, thank you very much.
But the minority’s resistance to that change in public law is due to their religious convictions, which are irrelevant to public law in a secular society. It’s possible that that the new majority is in favor of same-sex marriage because of a change in approval or disapproval of homosexuality, but I tend to doubt it. I think it is more likely that more people accept same-sex marriage because they recognize that their personal approval or disapproval of homosexuality has no relevance to what should be legal or illegal.
The ‘tipping point’ was when we decided, as a culture, that marriage was a voluntary commitment between equals who chose each other as the persons with whom to have sex and to love for the rest of their lives. That tipping point took a long time to come to fruition. That’s the real “re-definition” of marriage. Once we got to the point, barring same-sex couples from enjoying the legal protections of marriage has come to seem increasingly arbitrary and cruel. As indeed it is.
If you want to turn back the clock on same-sex marriage, then you need to return to a pre-feminist conception of marriage as a legal arrangement between a father and a husband as the transfer of property — the woman — from one to the other, for the purpose of producing children and maintaining the transmission of property from generation to generation. And that is “the Biblical conception of marriage”. (It’s also the Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman conception of marriage.)
My side has never been the majority.
We always were the little flock. Nothing has changed It used to be the state church with the power now it’s the secular majority.
In Europe it will soon be Islam that is pulling the strings of government.
“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss”
As always faithful Christians are the minority that spoils the fun
peace
It’s on my list. I marked it the first time I saw you post the link a few days ago. Looks interesting. Thanks.
Private charities benefit from tax benefits , consequently they agree to certain stipulations.
I would say the tipping point had a lot to do with sex and little to do with commitment especially for the rest of their lives.
as witnessed by the divorce rate among all kinds of couples.
If we wanted to return to the ideal. Marriage would need to be seen as the typological union of dimorphic individuals into one flesh. It has never been seen that way in the world at large. Just in Christianity.
Again if you don’t “get” the incarnation you will never understand what I’m talking about.
peace
I wish their books were better too. I wish their reasoning was better. After all, aren’t they, as the leading lights of the new atheism supposed to be paragons of reason?
So to clear things up for keiths who always seems to get confused by my OP’s, the point isn’t that atheists are angry at God. The point is about reason. An atheist who is angry with God is just an example.
Whether same-sex marriage should be legal or illegal has absolutely nothing at all to do with whether or not anyone understands the Incarnation. That’s apples and oranges — one has nothing at all to do with the other.
Or, more precisely, they have something to do with each if you want legitimate state power to be grounded in religious convictions. (We in the First World have pretty much decided that that’s a bad idea, but the Islamic State is all for it.)
But once you’ve decided that the state should be neutral about worldviews, then the fact that same-sex marriage is incoherent in your worldview has no bearing at all on whether same-sex marriages should be permitted by the state.
I am just curious, why do you think OMagain is unsophisticated?
Fifth, I have no interest in your religious faith or your theological ideas. You are welcome to them. But in this country, public accomodations — and that includes hospitals — cannot discriminate on the basis of religion. I suppose in an ideal libertarian utopia, everyone would be frre to be a bigot.
Not only that, but they could change the focus of their discrimination at a whim. A hospital might perform a procedure at 9:00 am and decide at 10:00 that it violates their religious principles.
Sounds perfectly rational in liberty world.
I prefer Kitcher’s Life After Faith. It takes up the same general position but it’s far superior.
But if petrushka and hotshoe are right, the New Atheism isn’t so much about good arguments as it is about giving people the courage to stand up to bullying.
I
I do believe this belongs in guano.
No one is stopping you, the question is do you have the right to have the government enforce your religious beliefs on a secular contract.
It might be a good idea if you are a Hutterite living in Saudi Arabia to know if the local hospitals will cotton to your life choices before you get sick.
If you fail to do that it’s not the hospital’s fault it’s yours
peace
Yep, and fifthmonarchyman’s whining that he and his fellow tiny powerless sect (whatever that is) of christianity don’t want to rule the world is just pointless. Because the historical fact is that christians, whenever they’ve had the power of the sword, have been every bit as bloodthirsty and unforgiving as ISIS is now. Christians are at this very minute agitating for the legal execution of homosexuals in Africa, encouraging the burning of “witches”, and making USAian political speeches that any doctor who saves the life of a woman by aborting infected already-dead fetal tissue should be jailed for murder.
If fifthmonarchyman wants to convince us that his religion is not a physical threat to us, then first he needs to convince his christian brethren to stop threatening us both physically and politically.
We hoped that civilized western societies had come to an agreement about the rational secular basis for law, but it seems we are doomed to continue to repeat the same argument as long as there are christians who think their special-snowflake faith should get some kind of special exemption.
petrushka,
I don’t know what you mean. I remember we had this discussion and Omagain never really explained if he thought his lifestyle was a choice or was a result of evolution. I thought that is why you were calling him unsophisticated.
I don’t really think that is the right word.
Anyway, I think it pertains to this thread, do you think deep down gay people could be angry at God?
I don’t think you do have that right.
Neither do I think it’s good for the government call my religious covenant a secular contract.
Which is the route we have taken
peace
If your premise that atheists are angry with God is not actually true, your point is unsubstantiated. Perhaps that was keiths point.
The government has no say in what you believe is an religious covenant, it can only say what is or is not a legal contract. It is a function of government.
Does it diminish your covenant to know others who do not share your belief cannot be excluded from the secular benefits of marriage?
Bullshit. What heartless bullshit.
Of course it’s the hospital’s fault. Or else it’s your god’s fault for bringing sickness to his faithful. It’s certainly NOT the ill person’s fault. Not even if they deliberately made life choices (to be missionaries) that bring them under the thumb of unfriendly regimes — that’s no excuse for the hospitals and doctors to give them bad care or no care.
There’s a reason why we respect the neutrality of the Red Cross and Red Crescent even on a actual battlefield. When christians insist on making the cities of non-christian nations into political/spiritual “battlefields” there is still no excuse for medical care to be less neutral than the Red Cross is.
And using the fact that Saudi Arabia is terrible as an implied excuse for why USAians should not complain about dominionist interference with secular policies — because we don’t have it as bad as the victims in Saudi Arabia do — is both stupid and unbecoming of a christian. You shouldn’t strive merely to be a tiny bit better than the worst.
hotshoe_,
I have never heard a good argument from a materialist to explain what constitutes better or worse.
I think Lizzie suggested that the society concerned should decide what is good and bad. There is no objective truth.
No, it’s not. That’s not a fact. No one is calling your “religious covenant” a secular contract. That’s not the route we have taken.
What we’re saying is that the secular contract which has been in use for a thousand years or so, alongside but separate from the church ceremony of “holy matrimony”, by the very definition of “secular” cannot be barred to some citizens on purely religious grounds. We can’t refuse the secular contract of marriage to divorced people or to known adulterers, just because some sectarian christians think that a divorced person can’t be united in holy matrimony under the eyes of god.
Trust a christian to get the narrative exactly backwards. If you don’t want the responsibilities (and benefits) of a secular marriage contract, then don’t get married. Get your church ceremony of holy matrimony and be happy that you’ve got something special not everyone can have.
I don’t want anyone excluded from any “secular” benefits. Be they gay, strait, single polygamous, incestuous or whatever. That is why I want government out of the marriage business.
That is not the path we have taken however. What we have done is try and extend the religious benifets of marriage to the sexual relationship that is cool right now to the exclusion of lots of other relationships that have just as much claim to those benifets.
That does not diminish my covenant but it leads to confusion and discrimination. For lots of folks in unpopular relationships and for other folks who don’t happen to agree with the redefinition that is popular with the powerful right now.
peace
Which religion?
fifthmonarchyman,
No, that’s quite badly mistaken. Marriage has always been a social and political institution. It is in non-Western societies, and in civilizations and cultures that pre-date the Bible by hundreds of thousands of years.
What happened was that marriage became a sacrament for Christians only when Church and State became fused when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
It’s not that the state needs to get out of the marriage business, but that religions need to stop treating marriage as a sacrament. It’s a legal status that has been part of civilization for several thousand years before the birth of Christ and even before the writing of Genesis.
So from your comment am I supposed to take it that you will be quite happy and not protest when a court in Saudi Arabia sentences you to 1000 lashes for insulting Allah? Even if you didn’t really do it? Because, after all, the society concerned “should decide” …
And it wouldn’t matter if you were sent there for your job, or went there as a missionary, or went there as an innocent tourist … they should decide and you should be happy about your imminent painful death, because there’s no “better or worse”.
Hmm. Something’s wrong with your logic.
SInce the christians think they should execute homosexuals in Africa, and since the Muslims think they should execute infidels in Arabia, we (the collective we, human beings) need a method to determine which, if either faction, is right to do so. I know – we’ll check scripture! Surely that will give us an objective answer!
Hmm, the scripture of the christians says one thing, the scripture of the Muslims says another. We need a method to determine which, if either scripture, is the correct one. I know – we’ll put that question to a vote!
Hmm, 1 billion christians worldwide. 1.2 billion Muslims. Guess the Koran is the correct scripture after all. Sorry about your luck, phoodoo, sorry about the 1000 lashes and death. But that society not only decided what was “good and bad”, they decided objectively by your own standards (that is, by the truth of scripture) so you can’t possibly complain.
.
.
.
Maybe next time you need to be protected from the crazy, you should be grateful that secularists are standing up for your rights too, even if you don’t deserve ’em. I don’t have to like you at all to notice that my evolved human empathy tells me you shouldn’t be tortured to death for any reason, and that a society that says you should be is wrong.
Even if you’re stupid enough to sincerely believe that I have no basis to judge what is “better or worse” I still don’t want you to fall victim to something that you and I would both agree is clearly worse in reality. Instead of poking at me because you don’t believe my argument, you should be thanking me (and people like me) because our argument that society must not allow sectarian religion to rule is what protects you (and people like you) whenever your particular sect is in the minority.
Right. They want something special, they’ve already got “holy matrimony” sacraments in their churches. They should be happy.
KN,
A reminder: There is a thread available in which you are free to back up your claims regarding the “intellectual mediocrity” of the prominent New Atheists.
I have disagreements with each of them, but I certainly wouldn’t dismiss them as “intellectually mediocre”.
Mung,
The problem for you is that I understand your OPs too well. For example, I understand that this OP is an attempt to change the subject away from your pitiful defense of the Bible as the word of God. You like to attack, but you get very uncomfortable when asked to defend your own irrational beliefs.
People can be atheists for good or bad reasons. Has anyone here claimed that all atheists are reasonable?
hotshoe_,
I believe you have misinterpreted Phoodoo’s post. He/she isn’t endorsing relativism; he/she is asserting that non-theists have no rational basis for not being relativists.
It’s the same BS we see on Uncommon Descent all the time. Arrington has been beating this drum exceptionally hard lately.
Oh, I’m sure that phoodoo is not endorsing relativism. The problem is that – by his own standards of goddy “non-relativism” – we still end up with objective theocratic behavior which he himself would suffer from. That’s what I was trying to show with an example of human-rights failure in Saudi Arabia — but I may not have been smart enough for the satire to come through.
Even if there is “objective” basis for morality out there somewhere (in god’s heart or in the fabric of the universe or whatever) it doesn’t do a theist one bit of help in our real world. It’s not going to help phoodoo to bleat about god-given morality or “a good argument … to explain what constitutes better or worse” when he’s the one being tortured by a theocracy who don’t happen to adhere to his own (personal or biblical) standards.
Of course, despite their continuing whine about anti-christian persecution, believers like phoodoo always assume at some level that their particular sect will be the one making the worldly rules as well as the spiritual rules. They consciously or unconsciously assume that when the state takes a preference for some religiously-based so-called objective morality, that it will be their particular one. But that’s not true in reality.
In the real world, it’s the secularists and the non-believers who are protecting phoodoo from people just like him who believe in the power of the state to violently enforce religious morality. It’s not as if he should fear only Islamists, either; could be an antagonistic sect of christianity, too. Christianity seems relatively tame recently, but we’re not that far removed from the days of “kill them all and let god sort them out”. And powerful christians are at this moment encouraging state murder for sins. Phoodoo, no doubt, assumes he’s exempt from that kind of christian terrorism because he doesn’t commit “that kind” of sin — but who’s to say what they’ll go after next?
The only thing that stands in principal between phoodoo and death by religious torturers is the widespread western social contract that we won’t do that; we won’t allow that because we have mutually agreed that we don’t like it when people try to kill us simply for not believing what they happen to believe – and in turn we respect that they don’t want us to kill them simply because they happen to believe something we don’t. Whereas if phoodoo and his ilk had their way with so-called objective religious law, their only hope in the long run would be that they never happened to find themselves on the wrong side of the majority-religious horde in their society. They snark at us for political ideas which supposedly reduce to nothing better than “Might makes right”, but that slogan is never more true than when Abrahamic religions rule. All praise god’s mighty army!
You’d have to pay me thousands of dollars to encounter BA in that den of iniquity. Without seeing his “arguments” I’m confident you’re right that it’s all bullshit. It fails in the real world, in any place where they don’t happen to have the upper hand, which might not be objectively wrong but is certainly objectively stupid.
Well there you have it !!!!
The goal is to do away with Christian Marriage as we know it. This is a big deal. It is probably the biggest attack on a religious faith ever.
The martyrdom of individual Christians is nothing compared to removal of the foundation of the entire faith.
Marriage: the union of a man and woman to become one flesh ((( is ))) the primary type of Christ and his Church. For Christians to abandon marriage as a sacred Typological covenant is the end of the Christian religion.
quote:
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
(Eph 5:31-32)
end quote
This is not a secondary doctrine.
No Christian marriage no Christianity.
I know that would make most of the folks here happy but It’s not going to happen and if it did the world would be a much darker place.
peace
It’s hopeless to try to explain anything to you.
.
.
.
Edit – even though KN is a saint and has tried to explain it, one more time (see below).
Bet my soul it doesn’t sink in for fifthmonarchyman, though. Nothing can ever penetrate their desire to see themselves as persecuted.