peoplw hwo protest at funerals

Blue laws

IMmigration reform

Head start

the statistically challenged

Pledge of alalegiance

god on the money

DARE

Science ignorance kills

Prison rehab

WHy don’t people just get along (everyone spends so much effort getting upset)

Freedom fries

politicians who stand for noting
Bad musicians becoming stars and having hits

DONE
consegrity

Circular reasoning (using Chuck Swindol 4-24 broadcast)

Headon

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The first full internet service on screen xanax in urine s was i-Mode introduced by NTT DoCoMo in Japan in 1999.

Number twelve is now available. Mr. Mike Clawson is the pastor of an ‘Emergent’ church in the Chicago area. Listen up and find out about this growing new take on Christianity.

OK so now that I have injected my opinion of C. S. Lewis’s defense of Christianity it seems appropriate that I review Sam Harris’s similar (in size anyway) indictment thereof. Mr. Harris’s book Letter To A Christian Nation is his response to the letters he received from his first book. Obviously I must admit to my personal prejudices in this manner and my intense compression of his views so I invite anyone who wishes to read Mr. Harris’s book and take issue with my analysis.

Mr. Harris begins his book with the statements that there are true differences between his beliefs and those to whom the book is addressed. Either Jesus was divine or he was just human and either the bible is divinely inspired/written or it is a work of humans alone. He states that while it is unknown when and how it may occur that in time, one (he or they) will be shown to be incorrect in their views. He comments on the fact that all believers are actually Atheists with the exception of their one faith and therefore they have personal experience with the point of view held by Mr. Harris. He then replies to the items that repeatedly have come up in the communications he has received;

Is the Bible the greatest most moral book ever written?

• The bible is full of terrible moral lessons (he gives examples such as slavery and women as possessions)
• Not only is the bible not a good moral guide, there are other sources as good or better. In particular Mr. Harris refers to Jainism as an example of a religion that is simply incapable of producing the evils Christianity can spawn but with the same positive message
• The 10 Commandments are by no means the moral foundation of anything. The first four are not moral at all and the several of the others are far from the most important moral lessons that could be taught

Perhaps the most telling moral point made is his observation that religious belief allows people to divorce their morality from the realities of human suffering. The religious have no requirement to actually examine the suffering (or relief thereof ) relative to their positions. They only need to follow the rules set out in their Holy books (generally on a pick and choose basis) and they are then by their definition moral!

Is Christianity a source of doing good ?

• Certainly good has been done by people who were Christians however much similar good(more and more recently) has been done by people who are non religious(Doctors Without Borders) and the secular groups are arguably more efficient and effective as they are not distracted by the irrelevancy (as relates to the actual relief of suffering) of doctrine.

Are Atheists Evil?

• Do they commit more crimes?
• When is the last time you heard of an Atheist riot?
• Were the famous Atheist mass murderers (Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pott) driven by their Atheism to do as they did or thier despotism?
• Do the least religious nations in the world (Norway, Iceland…) have more or less crime and lower standards of living?
• Do the Red states have more or less moral issues (criminal and social) then the Blue ones?

He admits that correlational studies like these may not get to the root issues (education, culture…?) but notes that it is clear that Atheism clearly does not cause moral failure.

Is the Bible prophetic?

• Since the Old Testament was there first is it any wonder that the New Testament writers would write their stories to show that Jesus fulfilled the already well known predictions?
• The bible is filled with un-fulfilled predictions and is such a vague predictor as to be useless

Does Science clash with religion?

• In every area except one in our lives believing in something in the face of evidence is considered madness and is the antithesis of Science

Is life a result of Evolution?

• Evolution is a much a scientific fact as is the statement that the Sun is a star
• The USA ranks 33 (just above Turkey) in accepting Evolution and is continually falling lower and lower in worldwide science testing
• If God created life then of course who created God? The ID answer actually answers nothing at allEvolution is the only process we know that does provide for the simple to create the complex.
• Only evolution provides an actual actionable answerSince well over 99% of all species have gone extinct God must not have been a very good designer
• While scientist are often accused of being arrogant they do not hold a candle to the average Christian who is certain that in all of the universe his prayers are important to a being who supports the exact beliefs of his sect.

Finally some quotes from Mr. Harris

• ”Atheism is simply an admission of the obvious”
• People say “God cannot be judged by human standards of morality. But we have seen that human standards of morality are precisely what you use to establish God’s goodness in the first place.”
• ”Faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to believe when reasons fail”
• ”How can we even how to reason with the Muslim world when we are not reasonable with ourselves?”
• ”Clearly it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous””
• ”I would be the first to admit that the prospects of eradicating religion in our time do not seem good. The same could have been said about efforts to abolish slavery at the end of the eighteenth century”
• To survive and prosper in the more and more complex world “We desperately need a public discourse that encourages critical thinking and intellectual honesty. Nothing stands in the way of this project more than the respect we give religious faith”
• ”Nonbelievers such as myself stand beside you, dumbstruck by the Muslim hoards who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well—by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God”

This is a continuation of my search for an apologist who actually makes sense and I have again failed. C. S. Lewis while dated, is still famous and even such a personage as Francis Collins who headed the Human Genome Project tells of his conversion from Atheism as the direct result of reading Lewis’s “Mere Christianity”. My following comments are drawn from Lewis’s short book “The Case For Christianity” which I have read cover to cover 4 times in an effort to find how it could possibly be a valid argument for anything.

The core of Mr. Lewis’s argument is clearly the argument from morality. His version goes thusly. 1) People know that they are doing something which is wrong or right and this is shared among all people and does not change over time or culture in any significant manner 2) People do whatever they do as a result of their instincts and drives and often do things that they know are ‘wrong’. His conclusion is that it is inescapable that there must be some outside influence that is setting up the definition of Right and Wrong (a natural law of Right and Wrong). It is not possible for me to over stress the importance of this line of thought to Lewis. He admits in fact that he was originally an Atheist primarily due to the problem of Evil and then he realized that he himself could not even know that Evil was Evil without an outside standard against which to compare and therefore there must be a God. The problem is that his logic here is laughable. In reference to a key point above (Have moralities changed) he states “But they haven’t. They have only slightly different moralities. “ Slightly , Slightly!!! Slavery was considered as moral by Christians for at least 1,750 of the 2,000 years of their existence, women were clearly considered property only (and not the most valuable item owned by most men) for the vast majority of human existence and Mr. Lewis has the Bold Faced temerity to state that “They only have slightly different moralities”. The other gigantic fallacy in his argument (I consider it a gift to even grace it with that title) is that The only source of any kind of shared socially developed morality can only come from the outside. He considers the impulses and instincts that motivate each of us to only be the simple direct emotional ones (Sex, Hunger, Greed….) and truly believes that without an outside arbitrator (he refers to a third force) that no unselfish act could ever be committed. He offers absolutely no evidence for these statements but makes them directly as if they are self evident.

Bizarrely enough he includes an example which directly refutes his basic position. In reference to the olden practice of burning Withches he states “ But surely the reason we don’t execute witches is that we don’t believe in such things ….. There is no difference in moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you don’t think they are there. “ I must agree that by this standard it is true that our morality has not changed over the millennia since he has now define “being moral” as “I agree to be moral to the best knowledge of how one should be moral at this time”.

Sigh.. there is much else to be lamented in this tome including many other unfounded assertion, false dichotomies and in general assumptions for which there is no evidence provided. In particular he spends time on the false dichotomy “A man who was only a man who said the sort of things that Jesus said…. Would either be a Lunatic or the Devil” . Or of course who he said he was the Son of God. He also technique that irritates me so of manipulating definitions as they go. “Now suppose that God became a man” . Well by his own definitions God is not man so the only way I could imagine it would be to redefine one or both of the words themselves which then leads to ……

So again I ask. How can it be that I a mere Engineer trained in nothing in particular can so easily se that these arguments are truly hole(ly) in that they are just plain wrong, invalid, bad, pitiful, ridiculous, a joke, fallacious, illogical….. yet not only have they reportedly been instrumental in helping(confusing?) thousands if not millions into becoming Christians/Theists but they also are the results of years and years of study and thought by a man who by my own admission was more intelligent, better read, and more experienced than I.

This article discusses the new more aggressive and public face of “New Atheism ” (maybe I should just take to calling myself that since the Brights and I are developing a little schism) I think it is really great that people like Dawkins and Harris and Dennet are finally telling the truth about religion. I have just finished my first pass through “Letter to a Christian Nation” and I loved it. Sam Harris is now on my very short list (George Carlin, Bill Mahr) of people who are willing to tell the truth about religion. I have recently watched several interviews with Dawkins and I completely concur that labeling children with religion (”Christian child’) and indoctrinating them before they are old enough to think for themselves is a form of child abuse (particularly since there are usually horrific threats (eternal life in Hell) to enforce the religious teaching).

Now I must admit that from a pragmatic point of view telling the truth about religion might not be the best way to make friends and influence people. In fact with regards to religion it can sometimes result in a shortened life span, but from a pure emotional point of view it just feels great to hear that there are people who are willing to admit publicly what I privately believe.

Of course (as has been mentioned) people get very upset when someone tells them that their cherished beliefs are not true. I understand that but do we measure the truth of something by the lack of upset it causes? I hope not. While many religious claims cannot be disproved, many can be shown to be false (age of the earth, special creation, the flood, the inerrancy of the Bible, the Bible as the most moral book ever written, Moses wrote the Old Testament) and many are certainly untrue in the general sense that we consider any unproven assertion to be false (Heaven,Hell,The Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, Christ rising from the dead, the existence of some immaterial something that contains our memories and personality and exists after we die…). That these items are not true is as established as many ‘facts’ we do teach. Should we avoid teaching them just because a large number of people disagree?

Why is it that we give religion a special status and implicitly accept that it is not just like a favorite color or food? Why do we universally accept that even if we disagree with them, we still respect the idea? It is through that misguided(IMO) respect of any and all religions regardless of the damage they do that the most radical and dangerous religions are given cover by us all Moslem terrorists may be killing tens of thousands yearly but do those who prevent the cures of certain diseases because they think a pinprick of cells less intelligent that an amoeba should not be destroyed (when of course we allow the harvesting of organs from a brain dead human and this has no brain at all) have any claim to a higher morality? The Catholic position on condoms allows the deaths of thousands (millions? Certainly more that the terroists) from AIDS yet I have noticed no ‘War on Catholicism’. While the belief in the transcendent may be a positive thing it is certain that 1) A belief in the unverifiable (or just wrong) is not required to achieve the same results and 2) Some religions are verifiably less harmful that others (Jainism and Buddhism to name two). Only by “Breaking the Spell” (Dennet’s term) and examining every facet of our existence critically can we continue to move society forward toward a more moral.

Most importantly there is a solution. I believe we really fail our children and future society when we fail to teach critical thinking skills such as how to examine the facts unemotionally. While we give lip service to the fact that the purpose of school is to teach the children how to think, I know of no school system that offers even an optional course in Critical Thinking. Perhaps that would be the place to start.

Number eleven is now on line featuring ME!!

As you have heard me say getting guests can be a challenge so instead of a guest, here is the Truth about Truth. What does the term mean and how can we look at it a little differently to assist in the endless discussion on the subject.

Number ten is now on line. Mr. Leroy Bull

Mr. Bull is a past president of the American Dowsers Society and has been dowsing for 51 years. We discuss dowsing, how it works and of course my disbelief of the entire thing.

Number nine is now on line. Mr. Tim Bolton

Tim is a fellow Brihgt here in Nashville. We talk about what it means being a Bright here and I play the Devil’s Advocate concerning Tim’s beliefs.

Number eight is now on line. Mr. James Huber.

James while not a Bright (we all cannot be perfect you know) has a fabulous web site where he explains how God told him to be an Atheist and other fascinating thoughts.