Month: October 2019

Examining the laws of logic as used in presuppositional bullshit.

The claim that laws of logic must be accounted for in order to use them is BS as demonstrated the fact that I don’t need to know how my car works or who built it in order to drive it. Like my car, the laws of logic work just as well for me as for someone who claims they can account for them.

As for the claim that we don’t even have a way to justify our acceptance (account for) of the laws of logic. That is also wrong. Scientists and philosophers do have observations and testing that in every single case show the laws of logic appear consistent throughout the universe, and we have never observed anything to the contrary. So it is by observation and testing that we can reasonably account for and confirm that the characteristics described by the laws of logic can’t possibly be any other way.

Presuppositional apologists are purposefully ignoring our observations that account for the laws of logic and then swapping in a different definition of the word law from the descriptive to the prescriptive – a false equivalence fallacy, in order to claim essentially that laws require a law giver.

The descriptive notion of all the “laws of nature” are distinctly different from the prescriptive legal notion of laws that are prescribed and must be followed. Scientists and philosophers are using the descriptive definition to describe what we see as characteristics of reality. If you claim that the laws of logic are not descriptive like the rest of the laws of nature, you are special pleading. Please demonstrate that while all the other laws of nature are merely descriptions of our observations, that the laws of logic are not.

The claim that a god is required to underpin the validity of, or account for, or even create, the laws of logic, necessarily means their previously had to have been a state of existence that does not require the laws of logic. Please demonstrate that there is even a possibility that such a state of being could exist, and then explain how a god or any other being could exist distinctly under conditions without the laws of logic. The fact that you will not be able to even define such a distinctive being without relying on the laws of logic, demonstrates that your god is in fact subject to the laws of logic, and therefore cannot possibly be their cause.

Using this presuppositional reasoning, it is enough to say due to the impossibility of the contrary, no god can exist that can be distinctly defined without using the laws of logic.

The fact that god who is distinctly definable cannot be the cause of the laws of logic, shows that this world view is not and can not be internally consistent as claimed.

The claim that nonbelievers are borrowing from a christian world view when in fact we are using observation and testing to account for the existence of the laws of logic is wholly unsupported and contrary to our verified accounts of said observations. It is therefore a false claim. Also, the notion that the god who is said to have created logic only needs to be capable of doing so demonstrates that god is not necessarily the Christian God. That claim is a non-sequitur.

The use of false equivalence, special pleading, non-sequitur, and use of wholly unsupported claims individually are sufficient to discount this argument as unsound or in valid. But using all 4 together shows just how completely vapid this argument really is.

1. If our soul is a perfect creation of God, there would be no reason for god to test it here on earth. Therefore God makes all souls on earth imperfect on purpose. If God makes us imperfect on purpose, How can it be a sin (offensive to god) to be imperfect. How can we be dammed for being a “broken” soul when god made us that way in the first place?

2. 50% of fertilized eggs do not develop and are simply passed by the body. If the moment of conception is when God imbues the new zygote with a soul, and then half of them die as part of God’s plan, why would God have given these fertilized eggs a soul in the first place, and how could we determine that abortion is bad when God’s plan prescribes it so often?

3. If souls are implanted at the moment of conception, but twins are the result of a zygote that divides into to embryos up to two weeks after conception, where does the second soul come from? Does one soul split in two? or does God not always imbue souls at the moment of conception? If there are two souls for twins, who later develop into a Chimera, a single person where one twin was absorbed by the other, does that person get two souls? Note that we do have examples where fraternal twins were absorbed and the resulting person has two different sets of DNA in one living being.

4. If we assume that God is all knowing and knows all the future outcomes, and could simply decide to imbue a soul whenever he wants, avoiding imbuing eggs that he knows won’t make it to full term, then abortion can never be considered murder as God would have known in advance that an abortion was going to happen and wouldn’t waist a soul on that embryo either.

5. If you accept that evolution is true, and human populations descended from earlier proto-human hominids, there is no clear line that can divide the first humans from their ancestors, so how could we tell at what point did God start imbuing souls into our ancestors?

6. Seeing as the flawed concept of the soul as described by Aristotle roughly 350 years before Jesus existed, and who’s view was males get their soul 40 days after conception, and females get theirs at 80 days, is so obviously arbitrary, but was later adopted by the catholic church in the 12th and 13th centuries, and differs greatly from current day beliefs which are inconsistent across various Christian denominations, and even more inconsistent with the beliefs of many other world religions, how could anyone ever accept the completely unscientifically supported concept as a fact?

7. Without a soul what would god have left to punish after we die? How can beings without souls in the first place be saved from eternal damnation of the soul?

8. Why is there no verifiable evidence for a soul after hundreds of years of scientific inquiry into whether they exist?

The soul is the single most dead concept in all of science. – Matt Dillahunty

In our modern understanding of justice, the punishment should fit the crime. Putting a child in a torture chamber and burning them alive for stealing a piece of candy, would be considered immoral and rightly so, when considering the impact on human well-being as the standard against measuring right and wrong. (For those of you that put God’s well being as a higher priority than that of human’s, please read this post which demonstrates how we can know that the concept of sin is total bullshit, then come back and finish this post.) The concept of hell is that of infinite punishment for a finite crime, and it is therefore immoral for the same reasons as exampled above with a child stealing candy. In the case where we are ignorant as to the impact of our actions, it is even worse.

Any being who is all-knowing and all-loving, would by definition understand this, and not create a place to torture people forever simply because they exercised the critical thinking skills they supposedly got from this god in the first place.

For Christians who believe in hell and that non-believers or those who don’t accept the unsupported claim that a god exists are sent there, you are saying that you are okay with notion that non-believers should burn forever simply because your God had his feelings hurt.

I would seem that the most popular Christian argument for this is, “God doesn’t send people to hell, they send themselves there by choosing not to belief the claims about god on faith.” Nobody sends themselves to hell, and here is how we know that.

The idea that people go to hell because they choose not to accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior is predicated on the mistaken concept that belief is a choice. It is not. Belief is a matter of being convinced. You can be convinced of something for good or bad reasons and it is usually on a scale where we can be more convinced of the truth of certain things than others.

A simple demonstration is you catch your husband or wife cheating on you, perhaps you walk in on them, or maybe you set up a video camera which documents their infidelity, or perhaps they even confess to you that they have been cheating on you. It is not possible to think you can just choose to believe instead that they have actually been faithful in light of your new-found knowledge that they weren’t.
Another example is the belief that if you jump off a building you will fall. After you have come to an understanding of the effects of gravity in this world, you can no longer just believe that you won’t fall. This belief is not a choice, it is the result of your learning experiences in life. Believing you won’t fall after failing over and over, and learning exactly why you can’t fly, is not a choice you can possibly make. The only real choice you have here is to deny realty, lying to yourself, and if you do so, you will still have to deal with the consequences of being wrong.

If a god exists, but provides no good evidence for his existence, one cannot be expected to be convinced he is real.

Good evidence would be anything that points exclusively to one conclusion over any other. As Faith provides a path to conclude any of the world’s religions are true, it fails to live up to the standard of good evidence. An ancient book that makes claims about the existence of a god, yet is in direct conflict with other ancient books that also make claims for the existence of a god, or gods, is equally poor evidence as long as we can’t show any of these books are true and no god shows up to clarify which religion has the correct account.

If an all loving, all knowing, and all-powerful god exists, then he should have no problem giving us good evidence for his existence. Clearly that can only mean he doesn’t want us to have that evidence, and believers who claim you must take his existence on faith, are admitting that fact.

Those who claim that if god reveals himself to us such that we don’t need faith to believe in him, often also claim that it would be a violation of free will for him to do so, ignoring the stories from their own holy books that tell us god did in fact reveal himself to many members of the story. Abraham knew god existed as he was reported to have had many direct interactions with him. Even the accounts of the devil tell us he is well aware of God’s existence, according to the story, still had the free-will to oppose him. Saul of tarsus according to his story, became a Christian and became known as the apostle Paul, only after Jesus revealed himself to him on the road to Damascus, and The doubting Thomas only believed after Jesus proved himself directly to him. These accounts show us that according to the bible being a non-believer right up to the time God revealed himself is actually quite reasonable and revelation has no effect on free-will, nor on keeping one from going to heaven. Last, knowing you will fall from a building, doesn’t keep you from exercising your free will to jump off the roof anyway.

Examining the doctrine of hell with the understanding that belief is not a choice clearly destroys that whole argument. If as most Christians believe, the only non-redeemable sin, is that of disbelief, all that would be required for a God’s wishes to be fulfilled would be for him to just show up.

If you simply think this is a good time to say “God works in mysterious ways” which is an admission you can’t understand him, please see this post which demonstrates why you can’t possibly believe something you can’t understand.

While “sin” may have several different definitions, for this examination, sin is defined as a transgression against God, an action that is offensive to God, going against God’s will or intent. A transgression against another person, or an animal is not a sin, unless it violates God’s will, or is offensive to God himself.

Do you believe that we are intellectually close to God? To make a comparison, if God is to us like we are to other living things, would we be like other animals? Or when compared to god perhaps you think we are more like insects, or even just an amoeba or other single cell forms of life? On a scale of 1 to 100, if god is 100, Where would you put us when compared to God’s intellect? While these questions are rhetorical, it is clear that the prevailing beliefs among various Christians and Muslims alike would place us very low on the scale, some would say we don’t even rate a 1.

A person with an ant farm doesn’t ever feel offended by the actions or beliefs of any of his ants. Even in the case when he or she may be trying to influence the ants’ behavior and the ants aren’t performing as desired, one wouldn’t get offended.

Additionally if a bear, shark or a lion tries to eat me, or if any other animal should attack me, I hardly think it is trying to offend, nor do I take offense, even in the case that the animal holds mistaken beliefs about me or my wishes.

Our legal system understands that we can’t hold young children to the same standards as adults when determining culpability, and we apply that to the mentally ill too, as we recognize that a person has to have the capacity to understand what they are doing is wrong.

How can anything that one animal does to another animal in the wild or even on a farm possibly be offensive to anybody, even to the farmer? By extension, how is it possible for one of gods flock to offend god by how he treats another member of the flock? Even in the case when people treat each other badly, clearly any people who are affected (including emotionally) by the behavior in question can be offended. How does this act offend god? What about when the offending person believes they are acting in accordance with god’s will?

You raise us up to the level of God when you think we can hurt him physically or emotionally offend him by our actions or beliefs.

The concept of sin is by its very definition referring to the behaviors that offend god or hurt god in some way by not acting according to his desires. If you think we are like an amoeba when compared to the intelligence and understanding of god, then we cannot possibly commit a sin against god.
The whole concept of sin is obviously bullshit and it gives both Christians and Muslims a tool to oppress others and claim to be righteous and in accordance with God’s wishes. For believers to accept that their idea of god is a being with the intelligence understanding and power to create everything in the universe according to his own design, and at the same time they think this same god would be offended by the actions and beliefs of humans on earth shows active cognitive dissonance. Why would a god design us to have brains that reason things out on their own and sometimes lead to behaviors that this super powerful being finds so offensive that they deserve eternal punishment torture and damnation?

The concept of Original Sin, as described in the bible is equally problematic when looked at with a modern understanding of morality. As a society we have moved beyond the obviously immoral notions of holding children responsible for the transgressions of a parent, or of substitutional atonement. Yet according to the bible, god has imposed an infinite punishment for the finite crime of disobedience, and, has declared all the descendants of Adam will suffer the punishment. Before Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, learning the difference between right and wrong, they could not know that what they were doing was wrong. Since the ability to understand why they were wrong is part of our modern understanding of culpability, and that was lacking according to the story, punishing them for what they could not understand is like punishing a mentally retarded person for not understanding the impact of something they’ve done. It’s wrong.

There are those who would claim that the God of the bible is so advanced when compare to us that we can’t possibly understand his ways. To them I call bullshit as I find it is actually quite easy to explain God’s actions in terms of the bronze age morality that the bible stories account for us. Certainly, if you apply Occam’s razor, it is a far simpler explanation that the source of this primitive morality is the crude tribal mentality of the human authors of the story.

For the last portion of this examination into original sin all that’s required is for you not to deny what science has shown to be true in the matter of genetic bottlenecking. According to what we now understand, it simply isn’t possible that there was ever a time when there were just two human beings alive, and a minimum population would be at least 50 individuals. The problems with limiting the gene pool are well understood and evolutionary biology teaches us that entire populations of primates evolved, not just two individuals. This means that story of the two first humans must be a myth.

If you accept the science, then you understand that means Adam and Eve could not have been the literal first two humans. You must recognize that the story about the “fall of man” and every human born after, being a descendant of Adam and eve, is a scientific impossibility. If the whole point of Jesus’ sacrifice is for all who accept it to be saved from the punishment for an original sin that they did not commit, and, as shown scientifically, was just an ancient myth, then those who are “saved” have only been saved from a mythical punishment that was never a real danger in the first place.

This is a link to yet another example of people using their religion as a tool to oppress others.

Let’s examine the benefits of religious belief that believers are afraid of losing when they contemplate giving up their faith, and let’s look at whether these benefits are in any way tied to the truth of their beliefs, especially the supernatural beliefs. And let’s identify which of these benefits, can still be achieved by secular means

1. a sense of community.

This is something that every church or religious group offers that we all find very compelling, the feeling that as part of the group that we can rely on the group for support when needed.

Groups like Recovering from Religion and their growing initiative called the secular therapy project, offer both a community and a model for starting more communities specifically designed for those coming out of religion. Another example is The Clergy Project, a group now consisting of more than a 1000 former and current clergy members from all over the country who no longer believe in the supernatural claims of their religion, but are often still preaching a message they no longer believe is true, and have no other means of financial support.

Seeing members of our modern society come together to form communities revolving around every kind of human interest, we can say that building community is not exclusive to religion. As long as the members of a given group feel a sense of solidarity and empathy for those in the group, a support structure exists for its members.

As mentioned above there is a community specifically for former believers and it is growing every day.
While it is undeniable that religious groups do offer a sense of community, religious organizations are clearly not the only place to find community.

2. sense of joy, wonder, and feelings attributed to the holy spirit.

This is a far more subjective benefit, as we can never really be certain we understand someone else’s emotional state of being. Certainly, people can get a feeling of enlightenment from reading a book and making intellectual connections that give the reader a new understanding about the material.

In fact it seems scholars in every field can tell us about a moment when they first came to understand a concept that had previously vexed them, and will often use terminology that mirrors that of believers who have come to a new or deeper understanding of a given point of religious doctrine. When scientists marvel at the amazing facts discovered to be true about the universe we live in, they often use words like awe and wonder to describe their feelings. In fact, for me too, I can confirm that feelings of wonder and joy are not limited religious experiences, nor have they diminished since giving up my faith. Many nonbelievers say that they are happier since they stopped trying to make their religious beliefs line up with what they know is true about the world we live in.

Tests have been done to study the brain states of people who pray or sing in church, and compare them to people who are listening to music and singing along, attending a concert, watching a movie, etc. Using MRIs scientist can show that the exact same parts of the brain are active in all those cases, producing the exact same chemical cocktails in our brains, and creating the same emotional experiences.

Once again this confirms that being in church does provide a certain type of emotional state that is not exclusive to being in church. Giving up church service doesn’t mean giving up your sense of joy, wonder, or happiness. Also as long as there are currently more than a thousand priests, pastors, and church leaders from every denomination who don’t any longer believe, and who are part of The Clergy Project mentioned above, we have a group of people, formerly the most devout people you could find, who confirm that the feelings they used to attribute the holy spirit, are no longer interpreted in that way.

The scientific inquiry above combined with the anecdotal accounts of former clergy members from every religion shows us that the feelings you get in your church are not actually tied to the truth of the religion. Every religion no matter what they believe all say that the feelings they get are proof of their god’s interaction with them, but they can’t possibly all be right if their supposed revelations, as we see, are in direct contradiction with each other.

3 heritage, culture, history, art, identity.

Religions from around the world with different origins, making different supernatural claims, and spouting messages that are in clear contradiction with one another have all influenced and contributed to amazing cultures, history, and art, and that is a clear demonstration that the truth of these religions is irrelevant to the fact that they have beautifully colored our heritage, and helped to define the identities of their members.

The well-known phenomenon of Jewish atheism (https://www.simpletoremember.com/articles/a/jewsdontbelieve/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_atheism) is an example of a group of people embracing their cultural heritage, celebrating it, protecting it, and clearly valuing it highly enough to continue passing it on to the next generation. At the same time Jews have continued to excel in science, business, and entertainment, such that they are overrepresented in these areas. According to a quick Google search, there are about 14 million Jews in the world, making them about 0.2% of global population, yet of the approximately 900 Nobel prize winners roughly 20% identify as Jewish (at least culturally). This of course demonstrates conclusively that giving up their belief in the god of the old testament has not had a negative impact on the Jewish culture, history, art, or identity.

Growing up in a Jewish household myself My mother and I both identify as atheist Jews, and yet are still very proud of our heritage. My father identifies as a deist, rejecting that the god of the bible is real, in favor of the concept of a god who is completely hands off when it comes to earthly matters, yet he too still claims his Jewish heritage is highly important to him personally.

Now we are seeing a rise in “Cultural Christians” who have recognized that they too can find value in their heritage, and identity as Christians, without the baggage associated with belief in things that can’t possibly be true. The same applies to those now calling themselves “Cultural Muslims”. The simple fact that these terms exist and are self-adopted by former believers from every religious group, shows us conclusively that giving up literal belief in the god’s of our culture, does not diminish the pride we feel from our reflecting on our heritage, culture, history, and art.

4. losing empty promises is losing nothing at all.

To paraphrase the outspoken atheist Matt Dillahunty, if you were lied to as a child and told you are going to inherit a billion dollars on your 21st birthday, and then you don’t get it, the impact of not getting it would depend on whether or not you believed the lie. If you didn’t simply accept the claim as true and instead lived your life as though you had no expectation of the huge windfall that was promised, then in the event you don’t get it, nothing has been lost as nothing was ever really had in the first place. However, if you believed the claim you were going to be super wealthy at age 21, then perhaps you would live accordingly, frivolously spending money, or not worrying about getting a good education, or preparing for a career, etc., and this behavior will undoubtedly have very negative impacts possibly devastating effects on your life when turning 21 and not receiving what was promised.

This situation is analogous to being told you will live forever and be with all your loved ones again in heaven after you die. As this is the one and only life we can confirm or demonstrate we will have, just assuming there is an afterlife based on unverifiable claims, could easily affect one’s decisions in this life. Just one example is making amends with a loved one at the end of life. For someone who is convinced they will have the chance to see a dying loved one again in the future may decide that a long trip that requires resources and time away from work, isn’t really important because they will get another chance in the future, even if they won’t.

People who live as though this is the only life we have, will treat it as more valuable than those who think we will live again and or live forever. Rarity is a common factor in evaluation, the rarer an item, the more we value it and the opposite is also true. If we live for an average of just 80 years, in a universe that has existed and will continue to exist for billions of years, the rarity of our time alive is obvious. However, if you think we live forever then even the billions of years the universe has existed for is just a drop in the bucket when compared to infinity. An infinite lifetime relegates an eighty year lifespan to practically nothing at all, and when comparing the value of just eighty years to the value associated with eternal life, diminishes the comparative value of our tiny lifespan. This conclusively demonstrates one way in which religious belief cheapens the value of our lives.

With regard to exploring the question of the benefits of religious belief being tied to the truth of the belief, giving up a supernatural belief in everlasting life, enhances the value to us of the one life we know we do have.

In the light of the above understanding that the regularly cited benefits of religious belief, are due to people, their empathy, and desire to always improve our condition, Matt Dillahunty has repeatedly asked for believers to come up with just one benefit of religious belief that can actually be confirmed to be tied to the truth of the religious claims, and no one has ever risen to the challenge. Hopefully this will help you to realize that all the benefits commonly associated with religious belief can be had without the supernatural bullshit, and when giving up your faith in god, you don’t have to worry about losing anything at all, especially when it comes to the empty promises of the various religious traditions.

If a community is what you seek then come and join the rest of us who put the needs and desires of people above that of a completely unverifiable god character from an ancient book. Secular Humanists put humans first, valuing all humans, not just those who believe a certain religious doctrine.