Religion of peace?

Note: As I just finished a rather lengthy op-ed piece on the recent Paris attacks, terrorism and Islam, I don’t feel the need to retread all of that ground here. I will post a link to the column once it hits the press. I did want to offer some other commentary on my experiences on Twitter and elsewhere online Friday night hours after the attacks took place. Those thoughts and my interactions on Twitter, are collected here.

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Umer Ali, a journalism student and contributor with The Nation, should be commended for having the courage to say what many in the West, even seasoned reporters and editors at major newspapers, have cowardly avoided, namely that terrorism (and the oppression of women, apostates and gay people) in 2015 is motivated by religion, contrary to the popular phrase on Twitter this weekend, “terrorism has no religion,” and that religion is political Islam based on literal and fundamentalist interpretations of the Quran and the hadith.

Sure, most everyday Muslims are peaceful believers — even though high percentages of Muslims support Sharia law in Middle East, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, according to Pew — but as I pointed out in the column this week, it is the dangerous, religiously-fueled ideologies permeating in places like Iraq and Syria that need to be challenged by leaders within Muslims communities since it is Muslims themselves, people of other faiths and skeptics and gays living in secrecy who are suffering the most under the heel of these oppressive regimes and statelets.

Here is how Ali concluded his honest and clear-minded look at the real problem:

The fundamental mistake committed by Muslims all over the world is statements like ‘Terrorism has no religion’, ‘Terrorists don’t represent Islam.’ Rather than being in denial and delusional, let’s accept the fact that these terrorists ARE Muslims and they DO represent an interpretation of Islam – which most Muslims reject.

Neither equating the whole Islamic world with terrorism, nor giving sweeping statements, acquitting it from the responsibility, is the solution. Islam needs a reformation and Muslims need to be educated about changing world realities and evolving societies.

West, on the other hand must realize that invading countries for the actions of few is not a viable solution, for it only helps radicalize more minds. A global effort to rewrite the anti-terrorism narrative is need of the hour too.

Thousands of liberals and Islamic apologists took to Twitter on Friday night and through the weekend in an attempt to disabuse us of the notion that religion has anything to do with terrorism. Most that I saw were critical of people who were bigoted against Muslims as people, but many, like the following tweet, did not distinguish between Muslims as people and criticisms of Islam on its own merits:

And there were and are many, many more, like these:

And, of course, this misguided tweet, and with it, the viral, cherry-picked quote from the Quran that makes Allah sound like some kind of peace-loving Jain:

Growing increasingly impatient with deluded statements like, “Islam is a religion of peace,” I took to Twitter myself Friday night and posted the following series of tweets:

And for proof of this, in addition to the numerous examples Umer Ali pointed out, we need to look no further than ISIS’ own statement on the attacks in Paris, which, in part, reads:

Youths who divorced the world and went to their enemy seeking to be killed in the cause of Allah, in support of His religion and His Prophet, Allah’s peace and blessings be upon him, and his charges, and to put the nose of His enemies in the ground.

As Ali Rizvi pointed out, ISIS’ statement is a reference to verse 59:2 in the Quran.

The point is that, just like with the Yahweh in the Bible, for however many verses Muslim apologists produce that seem to condemn murder and point to the benevolence of their god, other verses paint a contrary view. And even if the message from verse 5:32 in the Quran posted above was the consistent message throughout scripture, it’s still suspect and doesn’t hold water since no loving father or deity says, “Look, wretch, at how great I am; now get on all-fours and worship me” or else, die — unless, of course, we alter the definition of “love” to include such things as self-loathing and masochism.

The sooner we realize this as a society, the sooner we realize that Christopher Hitchens was right all along, that religion “infects us in our most basic integrity” as human beings, the better, and society will not move forward on a path toward lasting peace until that day.

The (cosmological) Quranic argument for God

As I was browsing YouTube today, I decided to see if users had posted any new or interesting videos about the existence of God. Since I have addressed a great many arguments from Christian apologetics on this site since 2009, I thought I would check out some arguments for God from Islam. As anticipated, while Islam has its own particular slant on the god question and in some ways is actually more accepting of scientific principles than evangelical Christianity, Muslims by and large use many of the same stock arguments for God as Christians.

Take the following video from Hamza Tzortzis:

Indeed, close your eyes, take out the accent, the Arabic and references to Allah and the Quran, one might imagine watching a diatribe from William Lane Craig.

In this video, Tzortzis tells us that he is going to provide the “Quranic argument” for the existence of God, which is really just the old cosmological argument that has been restated and refuted for hundreds of years now. In any case, Tzortzis identifies four “logical possibilities” for the existence of the universe as follows:

  • The universe came from nothing.
  • The universe created itself.
  • The universe was created by something else created.
  • The universe was created by something uncreated.

As you can see, possibilities 2-4 all commit a fallacy by assuming a priori that the universe necessarily had to be created — it very well could have just always existed, and while that is hard for our mind to grasp, it is nonetheless another possibility — but after ruling out the first three as impossibilities, Tzortzis then hones in on the fourth option, which he calls the “best explanation” for the existence of the universe. He begins to get on the right track when he concedes the point that the “something uncreated” doesn’t necessarily have to be Allah or any other god in human history, but when he then says that by using the “Quranic approach,” we can draw conclusions about the universe’s origins, we know where he’s going to take the argument.

Here are his basic “conclusions,” which we will more accurately call assumptions:

  • Assumption 1: “This uncreated creator must be powerful.” — Notice what he did there. He went from calling the entity an “uncreated” entity to an “uncreated creator” and then bestowed it with a certain power that was, up to this point, not part of the argument. Also as part of this first point, he implied that the mere existence of billions of atoms in the universe and the subsequent release of energy that occurs when an atom is split is somehow suggestive of a powerful god, although splitting just one atom does not produce anything near an atomic explosion, nor does the existence of atoms suggest anything other than the existence of atoms.
  • harris-meme

  • Assumption 2: The creator must be “intelligent and all-knowing” because “it created laws in the universe like the law of gravity.” — Like many of his Christian apologist counterparts, Tzortzis, most likely is speaking to potential converts or people who may be amenable to accepting his brand of faith, uses some fast talking to blaze through these last points, apparently hoping that he can move quickly enough through the message before any sparks of logic creep into the listeners’ minds. But if we slow down and hear what he actually says, we can see that he is just begging the question and taking as an assumption that which he might hope to prove. Simply put, the existence of natural laws in the universe only prove the existence of the natural laws and does not imply a law giver, just like the existence of the universe does not imply by fiat a conscious creator. Attributing laws to the various attributes we observe in nature is just our way, as humans, to describe our world in a scientific way. Unlike God or the various characteristics commonly attributed to him, we can demonstrate these natural laws, which would exist whether we had ever evolved far enough to discover them or not.
  • Assumption 3: The creator must be “transcendent” and exist outside of space and time. — This is a common trope in apologetics and was presumably conjured to excuse God from being beholden and subject to the laws of nature. Thus, believers might say, if we just put God outside of the observable universe, we can say that he is a higher force than anything in this universe and that he is the progenitor of morals, of the natural laws and of life itself. Of course, by definition, we can’t experience anything that is outside of our space and time; indeed, there is nothing outside of space and time. To say otherwise is to just make unsubstantiated claims based on pure fantasy, not unlike fictional tales of unicorns, the Loch Ness monster and Flying Teapot making laps around Planet Earth.
  • Assumption 4: The creator must be eternal. — This is just an extension of the previous claim. Here again, Tzortzis just makes another assumption about an uncreated creator, with no basis in reality, other than, perhaps, a deep-seated desire for it to be true.
  • Assumption 5: The “uncreated creator” must have freewill. — By now, and based on the other points, we can pretty well take it for granted that Tzortzis thinks a transcendant, all-knowing creator pretty well has free reign over his own decisions, but Tzortzis spells it out for us, although Allah or Yahweh being browbeaten and lorded over by an even more powerful overlord is humorous to think about. One might wonder, though, if this uncreated creator was “intelligent” and “eternal,” why would he so freely and benevolently choose to create the universe if he knew beforehand that a good 50 percent of his creation would be doomed to suffer unspeakable torments for all eternity, unless, of course, he was also a sadist and sinisterly set this plot in motion. In fact, if we were to judge God or Allah on his success rate, that is, the number of people who were compelled to believe based on scripture or inspirational speaking or some kind of “revelation” versus those who were not convinced of any of it, a 50 percent rate of belief for the most powerful force in the universe has to be disappointing.
  • Assumption 6: Humans sense the nature of God as creator as part of their disposition, and God as the creator is the “best and most comprehensive explanation” for the existence of the universe. — The first part of this assumption is just an appeal to personal experience, and as any judge, attorney or psychologist will attest, personal testimony is a poor basis to substantiate truth claims. Millions of atheists in the world, some of whom have sincerely searched for a spiritual component, have precisely the opposite experience, having had no innate sense of something spiritual outside of themselves, while millions of Buddhists have no conception of a theistic creator at all.

The last few seconds of Tzortzis’ video — and this ties into the sixth assumption — seemed to take a swipe at the Christian concept of the trinity in suggesting that God is one, rather than three separate, autonomous beings as in the Christian godhead.

Interestingly and ironically, Tzortzis says this concept is “irrational because it creates far more questions than it solves,” which would, on the surface, seem like a tip of the hat to Occam’s razor, if he hadn’t just spent the last five minutes making arguments about God that, themselves, raise more questions than they answer.

While it is true that we do not have an answer for why the scientific laws exist as we observe them in the universe, there is no reason to think that the eventual explanation will spring from anything other than a natural cause, as has been the case with every other question about the universe we have answered from science in the last 250 years. Why some believers think that questions about our origin are somehow exempt from having to be explained by natural processes, when all of our other knowledge about the universe comes to us this way, escapes all comprehension.

In the end, suggesting that an all-powerful, highly complex deity who sits outside of space and time is responsible for everything that we see in nature is, number one, a cop-out for having to come up with any kind of real explanation, and number two, complicates questions about our origin exponentially. For more on this, see my post, Response to Apologetics III: Aquinas and Occam’s razor.

Finding purpose without religion

A fellow Bunch member of mine, Ben Kervin, recently said he was “surprised” that he was feeling a lack of purpose thanks to his deconversion to atheism a couple years ago:

It’s great to be free from the superstitious thinking I once had, but sometimes wonder how god belief gave me an overall mental safety net. My conclusion is that no matter what belief system you are indoctrinated in, it gives you some sort of security, even if it is fantasy thinking. Maybe its some sort of anxiety cure for the shortness and unfairness of life.

Religion is definitely a kind of “anxiety cure” for people who are unwilling or unable to face the stresses and fears inherent in life without looking to a father figure in the sky for guidance, and ultimately, for a path to eternal salvation, thus in part negating the trepidation people have about death and the dark. Notice that I said “in part” negating that fear. Believers don’t seem to spend much time thinking about this, but like it or not and regardless of whether heaven is a real place or not, they will still have to one day face their own mortality like everyone else. As I told Kervin in a response to his post, believers and nonbelievers alike will have to come to grips with the fact that their consciousness will one day end, and whatever else might be out there, their physical lives will be over, and there’s no coming back.

This is why so many of us who have left the fold don’t want to spend another second following what we feel is a delusion of the highest order. Christians often attempt a “gotcha” moment by asking atheists to consider Pascal’s wager. I’ve addressed Pascal’s wager multiple times on this site, but suffice it to say that a person has lost much if he squanders the only physical life he has worshiping a god for which there is scant, if any, proof. They often ask: “What if I’m wrong?” Notwithstanding the fact that I could equally be wrong about Allah and or any of the legions of gods that man has invented through the centuries, if I am right that religion is a waste of time and resources, I am free to spend all of my Sunday mornings and the rest of my time on other endeavors that matter to me, learning new things or making memories with friends. Believers really only have one thing to try to convince nonbelievers to return to the fold, and that is fear, the one consistent bedrock element of all religions.

Believers also attempt to convince atheists with this effusion: That life without God is meaningless, and since meaningless is bad, belief must be good. First, this assumes that God — here I am referring to the god of the Bible — is the originator of all morals and thus is the only being who can bestow us with purpose. But as far as I can tell, the purpose that God supposedly gives us humans is almost exclusively theological in nature. Our higher purposes according to scripture: Spread the Gospel to the ends of the earth, win converts for Jesus and worship God. Readers of Rick Warren’s, “The Purpose Driven Life,” learned that Warren had been given a message from on high: That the five purposes for humanity (Read: Christians) were evangelism, discipleship, ministry, worship and fellowship. If you notice, however, ministering to the flock and the community is the only one that could possibly be construed to mean that we should work to make the world a better place. Christianity’s notion of ministry in the community is only partly about helping the needy or ministering to the community. That would be the second goal … or third or fourth. The primary objective is to reach people for Jesus, and if believers have to roll up their sleeves and do some real work to achieve the primary objective, so be it. This is the disingenuous and skewed notion of purpose that emits from the church. As such, I don’t necessarily know what is meant when someone is concerned about losing their purpose for life when they leave the church. The only purpose the church offers is a thinly-veiled nod to helping the community or serving needy people overseas, all the while carrying along a Bible in case they get to tell the story of Jesus to some unwitting orphan, ESL student or African villager.

So nonbelievers, then, shouldn’t despair that they have no purpose. Atheists are free from the kind of phony life purposes offered by the church and can create individualized purposes for themselves through philanthropy, mission work without the proselytizing, community projects, etc., and they can truly give back to their communities and make the world a better place than they left it. This is purpose without religion.

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Why I write about religion

Here is an honest confession from a former churchgoer turned nonbeliever (AngiAntitheist) on why she continues to discuss religion even though she knows it’s bullocks:

Some of her reasons are similar to my own. I enjoy exploring questions in religion and philosophy because it’s intellectually stimulating. As a churchgoer, I used to compose whole essays about certain passages in the Bible and how modern believers could find relevance from them and come away with some kind of moral lesson. I could still do this if I so desired.

Nowadays, I find that a better use of my time is to expound, not only on the many logical inconsistencies with the Judeo-Christian belief structure, but on the dangers of belief itself. And these are not just the intellectual perils. Religion has plenty of that to go around. No, I mean physical danger: parents who believe so much in prayer that they fail to take their sick children to the doctor when illness strikes, and when the kid inevitably succumbs to the illness, the words, “God‘s perfect plan,” shamefully spills from their lips; young men who fly planes into buildings for Allah and the promise of a reward in some long-hoped for paradise; Catholic priests who use the shroud of religion to coax small boys into back rooms of a sanctuary, strip away their innocence and then threaten them with more villainy if they say a word. And all of this just in modern times. This speaks nothing of the hundreds of years of oppression, violence, slavery and misery that religion has heaped on mankind, a misery that is flippantly and ludicrously explained away by the notion of original sin.

Believers may also wonder: if religion fills so many people with comfort, why spend so much time attempting to destroy people’s hope in prayer and even the afterlife? That’s an easy one and can be answered from the Bible. Doesn’t 1 Corinthians 13:11 say Paul put away childish reasoning when he became an adult?

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.

For all of his delusional ramblings, Paul did manage to conjure a useful line now and then. It’s too bad, however, that the adult reasoning that Paul is referencing here stops at religion’s door. Here in the real world, childhood fantasies are just that. Santa Claus ceases to be real when we begin wondering how he makes it to all the way around the world in one night, or how he possibly loads all those toys on a single sleigh. For believers, God is like an adult version of Santa who can grant all of their wishes; children who previously believed in Saint Nick want to hold onto the magic, as it were, and although deep down they might sense that it’s logically impossible for God to be both all-loving and all-powerful, they nonetheless desire it to be true so badly that they read their dusty book full of dusty old stories only a child should believe, all the while clinging to the myths.

And this speaks to another reason why I continue to write about religion. It emboldens that pre-evolutionary nature of our species. It plays on, and even thrives, on our fears of death and the dark. And it hinders well-meaning, perfectly reasonable adults in every other area of their lives from simply growing up and facing the world as it is without the filters and without the blinders.

The essential answer to the question, then, is that I write about religion to teach people to think critically about everything, and religion doesn’t get a pass just because some believers claim their texts are sacred. As Euripides is quoted as saying: “Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.” If the human species is ever going to crawl out of the logical malaise in which it finds itself, critical thinking about religion must mirror the critical thought that we graciously afford everything else in our lives. We make careful, calculated, and for the most part, well-reasoned choices when it comes to our finances and major life decisions; why are we so willing to hop out of the boat on faith when there is not only little evidence to warrant such a decision, but when the supposed “evidence” from the Bible that we do have is fatally flawed on nearly every area of inquiry that matters, from science, to history, to literary analysis and philosophy? Such is the power of religion to poison; I write to concoct a cure.

Edit: After reading over this explanation on why I write about religion, I realized it was deficient in at least one area: I also criticize faith in the hopes that something I have said may give comfort to those who have likewise dragged themselves out of religion. To “come out” as a nonbeliever here in America is hard enough in certain contexts; to do so living under the heel of a theocracy in some wind swept Middle Eastern village may be unthinkable. And here is another of religion’s perils: once under religion’s spell, a person does not have the freedom to merely change their minds without facing potentially severe consequences. At best, these may includes causing damage to relationships or losing a whole network of friends, or at worst, ostracism from the community or physical reprisal. These consequences are unacceptable, all for committing the “sin” of thought crime.

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One true God?

Via Why Evolution Is True.

OK, so while this is not entirely airtight, it’s amusing, especially the Allah column.

I would say, for instance, that Catholics, at least modern Catholics in America, are probably more accepting of gays than Protestants. Admittedly, I’m not in those circles anymore, so I could be entirely off base. I also think that the Protestant category should have been subdivided into traditional and evangelical. Also, the “Mary Is ..” category is not terribly accurate in the Protestant column since, while she was a nobody as far as her earthly life was concerned, she was the host of an immaculate conception and the “mother” of God.

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Signs of the Muslim behind the Fort Hood shootings

I thought this was an interesting and detailed look at the personal life of Nidal Hasan in the days leading up to the Fort Hood shooting, in which 12 were killed and 31 injured. He was most likely emotionally distressed, troubled about the death of his mother, lonely in his personal life and isolated because of his Islamist views. According to the article, he was sometimes haggled after 9/11 for his religious views. While in the Army, his car was vandalized twice, and he described himself as “an outcast.”

In fact, while reading this story, I was partially struck by how similar this fellow’s social life was to my own. Of course, I don’t have the double hindrance of religion, but in social circles, he likely felt, to put it no other way, awkward.

One day in 2006, as Hasan edged toward his late 30s, he attended a matchmaking event at the Islamic Society of the Washington Area. The annual gathering is a last-chance staple for hundreds of Muslims, some of whom travel from as far as India or Hawaii, to mingle over a breakfast buffet. But attending such an event was an uncharacteristic step for Hasan, who steadfastly avoided group parties with co-workers and who, his aunt Noel Hasan said, “did not make many friends easily and did not make friends fast.”

Under the personality and character section of a questionnaire, he described himself as, “Quiet, reserved until more familiar with person. Funny, caring, and personable.”

Of course, to say all that is to say that I somewhat identified with him socially. We must have been of a similar mode, at least in that one, and only, regard.

And then there’s religion.

The day of the shooting, among other sundry activities, he left his Apartment 9 room and visited a devout Christian neighbor, who was apparently puzzled

when he handed her a copy of the Koran and recommended passages for her to read.

Then Hasan delivered this chilling, but not altogether shocking statement, coming from a fanatical Muslim:

“In my religion,” Hasan told her, “we’ll do anything to be closer to God.”

Anything, indeed.

I’m currently reading “Islamic Imperialism” by Efraim Karsh, which recounts the rise and fall, and the apparent and attempted new rise of the caliphate in the modern world, of the Islamic empire that swept through the Middle East and parts of Europe beginning in the 7th century. Unlike the variants of Judaism, Protestantism and Catholicism, the general message of Islam has been largely uniform down through the ages since the Koran was first cobbled together and borrowed from texts of the aforementioned religions (To attempt to claim that Islam is a peaceful religion, as President Barack Obama and others have done, is just playing nice and skirting what the religion’s texts actually say). Take these statement to which Karsh brings to light one right after another in his introduction:

  • “I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god by Allah.’ – Muhammad’s farewell address, March 632
  • “I shall cross this sea to their islands to pursue them until there remains no one on the face of the earth who does not acknowledge Allah.” – Saladin, January 1189
  • “We will export our revolution throughout the world … until the calls ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.” – Ayatollah Khomeini, 1979
  • “I was ordered to fight the people until they say there is not god but Allah, and his prophet Muhammad.” – Osama bin Laden, November 2001

I encourage folks to read the article about Hasan because it really is troubling that he left so many signs about his oncoming and present extremism, according to the above linked article and apparently no one had the foresight to see the signs and confront him about them. In the midst of his increasing devotion to Islam in college,

he gave the culminating presentation of his medical residency to 25 colleagues and supervisors. He was allowed to talk about any subject, and Hasan stood at the front of the room and gave a 50-slide introduction to Islam.

Slide 11: “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.”

Slide 12: “(4.93) And whoever kills a believer intentionally, his punishment is hell.”

Slide 49: “God expects full loyalty.”

Slide 50: “Department of Defense should allow Muslim Soldiers the option of being released as ‘Conscientious objectors’ to increase troop morale and decrease adverse events.”

Irreducible complexity and the anthropic principle

Returning to matters of religion and science, I’ve been listening to scientist Richard Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” audio book, and he, like other authors, who have taken up the subject of God, visited the ideas of irreducible complexity and the anthropic principle. I’ll take both one at the time.

They are both interesting and quite detrimental to the idea of a creator. Creationists argue from the irreducible complexity stance that we can point to certain body parts, like eyes or wings, as irreducibly complex, meaning that they would be useless organs if they were missing parts. Essentially, that they are uniquely perfect in their whole form and would serve no purpose if any of the parts were not there.

Apologists argue that since eyes, wings and other examples would be useless in such unwhole states, thus providing supposed evidence that a creator must have brought these elements into being. They also argue that the theory of natural selection breaks down. Natural selection posits that life evolves, not randomly or by chance, but by an intricate process that, over time, roots out the unfit elements in body parts and species, in favor of those parts that support survival of given species. Natural selection, then, according to some apologists, is invalid because we can find examples of organs or body parts that are complete in and of themselves and are useless without existing as a whole.

Charles Darwin, himself, even said that the “eye … could have been formed by natural selection seems, I fully confess, absurd in the highest degree,” which Dawkins noted that Darwin’s statement was a rhetorical device, not an admission that the eye was irreducibly complex. Dawkins notes that “a cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed cannot see clear images without glasses but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff.” Flat worms have a “blurred and dim image, compared to ours” and have something less than half of human eyes. The cephalopod nautilus has an intermediate eye between flatworm and human.

Dawkins:

It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes and many are all better than no eye at all.

For another discussion about the eye, see here and for another on the flagella motor, another mechanism claimed to be irreducibly complex, see here.

Now, turning to the anthropic principle, has anyone reading this ever wondered about the probability of a world like ours forming that was perfect for the development of life? Surely so. But probably so, also, there is another world, yet undiscovered, possibly undiscoverable, that also houses life. It blows my mind, and it should yours, the sheer number of, not only planets, but galaxies in our universe. Not only that, but some scientists suggest that we are part of something called a multiverse, a group of universes, which in themselves, contain billions of galaxies, and dare I say, trillions of planets.

According to Dawkins, which is also according to astrophysicts, our galaxy contains between one billion and 30 billion planets. Moreoever, our universe contains about 100 billion galaxies. Take the irrefutable low number here. We don’t need 30 billion. Just take one billion: what would it mean to believe that a creator has fashioned this planet uniquely and ignored the others among a pool of one billion planets?

Did he fashion any others? Did life develop on any others naturally? It’s possible. The sheer number of planets in the universe suggests that we might not be alone, and further, that we might not be so unique after all. It also raises the probability, incredibly, that life on this planet was formed naturally. Dawkins, here, takes the estimation of a billion billion planets in the universe:

Knocking a few noughts off for reasons of ordinary prudence, a billion billion is a conservative estimate of the number of available planets in the universe. Now, suppose the origin of life, the spontaneous arising of something equivalent to DNA really was a quite staggeringly improbable event. Suppose it was so improbable as to occur on only one in a billion planets.

A grant-giving body would laugh at any chemist who admitted that the chance of his proposed research succeeding was only one in 100, but here, we are talking about odds of one in a billion, and yet even with such absurdly long odds, life will still have arisen on a billion planets of which Earth, of course, is one.

This conclusion is so surprising, I’ll say it again. If the odds of life originating spontaneously on a planet were a billion to one against, nevertheless, that stupifyingly improbable event would still happen on a billion planets (my emphasis). — “The God Delusion,” Richard Dawkins

This conclusion was so stunning that I have rewinded numerous times. Apologists, of course, simply ignore talk that the planet is millions of years old and the universe billions. They also ignore more irrefutable evidence that we now know that “things” existed well before God’s supposed creation of all things 6,000 years ago, including the domestication of dogs and humans.

But now turning to God. What would it mean to believe that a creator put this whole cosmic slideshow into action? What would it mean that he was the creator of all things, living and non. It would mean that he would have to be incredibly complex, not simple, and as Dawkins states, irreducibly complex:

Even though generally irreducible complexity would wreck Darwin’s theory, if it were ever found, who’s to say it wouldn’t wreck the intelligent design theory as well? Indeed, it already has wrecked the intelligent design theory. For, as I keep saying and will say again, however little we know about God, the one thing we can be sure of is that he would have to be very, very complex, and presumably irreducably so. — “The God Delusion,” Richard Dawkins

Thus, if we assume a creator, we get ourselves into an infinite regress, which eventually begs the question: Who created this extremely complex creator? He was always there, you say? Did he create himself? How could he possibly just always be there ad infinitem given his apparently complex attributes? Because he’s a god? That explains nothing. If he is actually active in our universe and in our dimension, does he supercede the natural laws that govern them? How can he supercede them? Because he’s god? That’s just a statement that means nothing. Simply stating that Poseideon or Zeus or Allah or Yahweh are gods does not make it so, nor does it ascribe to them attributes which trespass on natural laws that govern the world. 

The Bible, of course, begins on this assumption, and moves forward on a pre-known set of events that, if God really loved us, he would have stopped the whole stupifying process from the time Adam and Eve first tasted of the fruit and stopped the entire bloody, hellbent affair that will lead millions of his creation to fire and brimstone. But no, he persisted and allowed thousands of years of suffering in the name of, and because of, religion. Moreover, he sat by idly amid tens of thousands of years of early human suffering and clambering toward enlightenment they would never know. He watched it all with folded arms, and then, from the Christian view, finally decided to intervene about 2,000 years ago in illiterate, Bronze Age Palestine, not in China or other parts, where folks could actually read. A fine place to begin a new religion, indeed.

Obama’s speech in Cairo and Islam

My apologies. I have been away from this blog for awhile working on various projects, none the least of which is helping catalog a large online gaming site. Needless to say, leisure writing hasn’t been the highest on my agenda lately since those folks want the work done as quickly as possible … and so do I.

I wanted to briefly mention President Obama’s recent, sweeping speech in Cairo, which seemed to bring mixed reactions from Middle Easterners. I think the most encouraging statement in this article was this:

Again and again, Muslim listeners said they were struck by how skillfully Mr. Obama appropriated religious, cultural and historical references in ways other American presidents had not. He included four quotations from the Koran and used Arabic greetings. He took note of longstanding historical grievances like the stain of colonialism, American support for the Iranian coup of 1953 and the displacement of the Palestinian people. His speech was also embraced for what it did not do: use the word terrorism, broadly seen here as shorthand for an attack on Islam.

“He spoke really like an enlightened leader from the region, more than like a foreigner,” said Mustafa Hamarneh, the former director of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan. “It was very unlike the neocolonial and condescending approach of the previous administration.” — The New York Times, June 4, 2009

Around the office, we sometimes discuss which religious group, Christians or Muslims, have historically been the most reckless bunch when it comes to making humanity suffer as they, down through the ages, have cherry picked portions from their texts to validate certain actions or policies, while ignoring other passages that seem to contradict the others.

I think we can safely say that certain segments of each have been quite brutal in their approaches to the carrying-out of their respective deeds, which have included, and this is the very short list: slavery and the slave trade, the Inquisitions, the Salem Witch Trials and 9/11.

But I think today, as Christians have cooled and figured out that viewing certain groups of people as inferior is categorically foolish and have put off the notion of conquering the world, literally, for God is also not something that is acceptable in modern times, the followers of Islam have just gotten nuttier by degrees, at least the branch that Osama bin Laden follows. Thankfully, many in the Islamic world aren’t literalists and don’t really believed all that their sacred book commands. If they did, we would all be in trouble.

For Obama to imply in his Cairo speech that Islam is a peaceful religion is merely trying to make it fit into our country’s interests in making it a peaceful religion to, consequently, ease tensions over there and criticize bin Laden and crew as being “extremists,” which of course, they are not: they are literalists. Here is an enlightening critique of parts of Obama’s speech.

Sam Harris has spoken much about the problems that religion poses to the rest of the world. In this interview, he speaks directly about Islam:

To speak specifically of our problem with the Muslim world, we are meandering into a genuine clash of civilizations, and we’re deluding ourselves with euphemisms. We’re talking about Islam being a religion of peace that’s been hijacked by extremists. If ever there were a religion that’s not a religion of peace, it is Islam.

Bin Laden himself makes the work of proving that point fairly easy:

“Do not take Jews and Christians as allies,” he (Obama) said. “We either live under the light of Islam or we die with dignity … brace yourselves for a long war against the world’s infidels and their agents,” said Bin Laden in the recording posted on a website on Thursday. He said Obama had planted “seeds of hatred” among Muslims. — Daily Times, Pakistan, June 5

This type of lunacy, of course, has no place in the modern world and must end immediately. But it won’t. As long as people continue to believe with all their hearts in the legitimacy of flawed and intra-contradictory ancient texts written in a time of superstition and myth, that paradise awaits those who sacrifice their lives for Allah or God or whomever, without interjecting a shred of reason or logic, peace will not come. That’s a fact I wish was a myth.