You remember Mr. Sherman — Illinois Representative Monique Davis interrupted him while he testified before the Springfield House State Government Administration Committee to spectacularly flip her shit:

I don’t know what you have against God, but some of us don’t have much against him. We look forward to him and his blessings… I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois… This is the land of Lincoln where people believe in God… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous… It’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists… Get out of that seat! You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.

This is just a sample of Mr. Sherman’s experiences. Come out and join the discussion this Tuesday!

When: Tuesday, May 5th 2009, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
Where: Quaker Meeting House, 4836 Ellsworth Ave., Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (Oakland/Shadyside)

Oh hey! This Friday our friend Hemant Mehta¹, The Friendly Atheist, will be speaking at Carnegie Mellon, hosted by CMU’s AHA group. Pasta will be served!

More deets at the AHA’s Facebook invite and also at Hemant’s site.

Oh hey Part Two: Internet podcast talk show host The Infidel Guy interviewed local “paranormal investigator” John Lewis² who appears to have a physical aversion to questions. He apparently came down with the flu in the middle of the interview and his wife came on the line, apologized, and hung up on the call.

Here are links to IG’s show notes and to the archived show.

First, these conversations are troubling because believers think that quoting scripture will be convincing. No matter how many times I point out that it’s circular reasoning to say, “God exists because the Bible says so, and the Bible’s true because God wrote it,” believers still assume that I’ll have some inherent respect for the truth value of their book–to the point where I’ve received emails consisting entirely of copied-and-pasted Bible verses. No matter how many errors, contradictions, falsehoods, and immoral passages I point out in the Bible, believers know that somewhere in the recesses of my rebellious mind, I still recognize that the Bible is the perfect word of a perfect god and that I’ll be “convicted” by what it says. This is best explanation I can come up with for why they think quoting Bible verses will be helpful. Most of the people I’m referring to are aware of the fact that I’ve been immersed in the Bible since before I could walk and have read it cover-to-cover several times.

Second, I find these conversations with believers troubling because they demonstrate a lack of respect for my intellectual honesty. A good friend told me earlier this week that I’ve “been caught up in the popularity of the new atheism.” The implication of this statement is that I know good old-fashioned Bible-believing religion is true, but my desire to try something new or different has just gotten the better of me. Let me ask you a question: if you knew that you would be tortured for eternity if you hopped on a popular bandwagon, would you do it? Isn’t this a no-brainer? Hhmmm…eternal torture looks a lot better when combined with the possibility of looking trendy for the next few years….

The same case applies to the argument that I chose atheism because I fell in love with sin. Let’s think about this. What sins am I currently committing that I was previously restrained from committing when I was religious? I don’t steal, I don’t litter, I don’t treat strangers or my friends badly…well, I do support gay marriage, but I’ve always done that, even when I was religious. I can’t really think of anything else. I’m not the best guy in the world, but there’s no huge rush of sinful lifestyle changes that I was really able to dig my greedy fingers into when I abandoned Christianity. Most of the atheists I know are the same way. Even if there had been a ton of fun new sins available to me after my deconversion, however, would any of them have outweighed the assurance of eternal torment? Seriously? I don’t think so.

If I can move into subjective territory here, it’s also worth noting that atheism for me doesn’t really fit the basic requirements of “popularity.” As the least trusted minority in America, a lot of atheists stay “in the closet” to prevent isolation from their believing communities or even to keep from losing their jobs. To this day, nearly all of my oldest and closest friends are strongly religious. Without exception (or with one exception), my entire family is religious. They think I’m going to hell to be tortured eternally, and they’re on the side of the guy who hates me enough (love the sinner, hate the sin, still send the sinner to hell?) to send me there for not seeing a difference between the mutually exclusive god-claims of all religious groups. Unless you’re in what would currently have to be termed “unique” circumstances, the popularity of atheism argument doesn’t fly.

At least start out by giving me the benefit of the doubt. If, after a few conversations, you realize that I’ve aligned myself with atheism for superficial reasons that don’t have rational support, then you can start talking along the “deep-down he really knows the Bible is true” lines. But until that time, have enough respect for my intellectual integrity to assume that I’ve chosen atheism because it makes the most sense. In fact, in light of the stunning lack of evidential support for any religion, atheism is the safe bet. One of the deepest flaws in Pascal’s Wager is that it ignores the existence of other religions that would send you to hell for betting on whichever one you randomly chose in order to hedge your bets. Isn’t skepticism until evidence emerges the safest possible place–especially in light of different religions that all rely on the same “just believe” and “old books” stuff to make their cases?

I only recently realized how powerful the Euthyphro dilemma is. Throughout my life, I’ve had certain areas of thought that have been simply closed off to critical thinking. The journey out of religion has been the process of intentionally examining many of these areas and exposing them to the discerning light of reason, abandoning ideas that couldn’t hold up under basic scrutiny. Still, there are many things that I know I have yet to consider in a critical light. Until a few months ago, the Euthyphro dilemma was one of them. I was so used to accepting the stock religious answers without questioning their validity that I didn’t see why the Euthyphro dilemma was particularly compelling. So let’s get to it.

As you likely know already, the heart of the dilemma comes in Plato’s dialogues where Euthyphro tells Socrates, “Piety is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.” Socrates responds, “The point which I should first wish to understand is whether the pious or holy is beloved by the gods because it is holy, or holy because it is beloved of the gods.” In other words, “does God command what’s moral because he recognizes that right and wrong exist objectively outside himself, or does he define right and wrong as simply whatever his own nature dictates?” Neither of the two answers is acceptable.

Let’s look at the easy one first. If right and wrong exist outside of God and he’s just going along with them, then there’s a higher power and authority than God. There’s something or someone else that we can look to for moral authority, and God is an irrelevant part of the equation. I don’t personally know any Christian who would affirm this option, although, without the irrelevant God part, it would probably be the position taken by most secular humanists when exploring morality.

So what about the second answer–that right and wrong are an inherent part of God’s nature and that he makes the moral rules himself, based on what he wants? For a while, I thought this was very compelling. I thought that right and wrong were based on God’s nature and character, and that if God liked different things, we’d think different things were right and wrong. As a fundamentalist Christian in high school, I actually told a friend the following: “All our morality comes from God. If God was a murderer, we would think that was a high virtue and pursue it as best we could.” Yes, I actually said that.

When you really think about it, however, I don’t think theists can affirm this option in the Euthyphro dilemma, either. Morality isn’t as simple as “because I said so.” Life is more complex than “what are God’s preferences?” If right and wrong are indeed completely arbitrary for humans, based on what God happens to like (though his omnipotence means that he can change his mind about morality, as he most certainly did when transitioning from Old Testament to New), then God himself has no standards.

After critical examination, can you really think that murder wouldn’t be wrong if God, whose preferences are our only moral source, happened to like it? We’re alive, and we want to stay that way. Life is short, and living is, for the most part, good. How could any of this change, structurally speaking, if God’s preferences were different? We know that killing is wrong and harmful completely separately from what God might or might not be like.

I can hear the objections now–because I’ve heard them before: “Of course we can’t imagine a system where murder could be okay, because our minds are so completely influenced by God’s character; we just couldn’t picture it any other way.” This objection does not stand, as most Christians would admit that our morality isn’t perfectly in line with God’s to begin with. Why else would some people feel fine about being gay, getting drunk, or committing other sins? In Christian theology, we don’t share God’s perfect holiness–we think about things in a different, human way.

It’s not like our wills are so intertwined with God’s that if he changed his mind we would suddenly start seeing morality in a completely different light. We’d still have our separate, human way of going about things, which would be based on our experience and expectations about life, and open for revision as time goes on and we refine our moral sensitivities. Unless it’s not already clear, this is a good thing. Commands from God (or actions based on God’s perceived character) are dangerous fantasies because they can justify almost anything and aren’t up for discussion. Not having those dictates (or a moral system based purely around what you think God’s arbitrary personal preferences are) is a good thing because it means we can discuss important moral issues and come to reasonable, human-focused answers.

1. Atheism is a religion.
2. Look where atheism leads: godless Communism!

The irony of juxtaposing these frequent criticisms is rich. If atheism is a religion, why is the absence of religion to blame when considering the crimes of Stalin? Without a god–any god–to keep society in check, it degenerated into godless atheism…except…they had the “god” of atheism, because that’s a religion, of course…but atheism isn’t a “god” because Stalin’s Russia was godless…etc.

Atheism’s critics should make up their minds and not play on both sides of the critical fence here. The logical conclusion, of course, is to realize that atheism isn’t a religion, but political leader cults and dictatorships often are. In atheism, there are no gods, no dogma, no required beliefs, no rituals–nothing but the absence of one particular belief. This is an absence of belief that atheists can agree on with Muslims when discussing Hinduism, and agree on with Jews when discussing Christianity. It’s simply rejecting belief all gods instead of rejecting all but one as Muslims do. There is nothing in atheism to dictate what you (or Stalin) should do, but religion takes the opposite approach.