Top posts of 2014

Better late than never! Here is a collection of ODT’s best posts from the last year:

Sye Ten Bruggencate versus a ham sandwich (Dec. 23)— I have to say, after hearing Sye Ten Bruggencate in several “debates” and learning more about this bizarre branch of Christian apologetics called presuppositionalism, I have to say he and his ilk make St. Augustine look like Friedrich Nietzsche. Case in point …

John 3:16 revisited (Dec. 22) — How much did God really love the world? A quick revisiting of the story will show that either a) not all that much and quite possibly the converse of that or b) he had good intentions that somehow went awry as soon as the serpent showed up in the garden, an option that itself belies the very nature of an all-knowing, all-powerful God. …

Anita Sarkeesian and violence against women in video games (Nov. 14) — More than a year has passed since I have commented at any length on feminism and the issue of gender equality because frankly, the blog/YouTube wars and constant bickering between feminists, the men’s rights crowd and those who are somewhere in between made my head hurt. …

Affleck, Harris and the ‘liberal’ response to Islam (Oct. 10) — I’ve always thought of Affleck as a sharp and thoughtful guy, but based on this he seems to me to represent the kind of weak-kneed, truly bleeding heart liberal of GOP folk lore who has little understanding of the real world and just wants everyone to play nice and not criticize anything or anyone lest we be called racists or bigots. …

Outfoxed again and again (Aug. 27) — I wouldn’t care whatsoever if FOX News just came out and said to their audience that they were a biased news organization with a clear agenda of castigating President Barack Obama, the Democratic Party and all progressives at every opportunity. At least that would be honest. …

Debunking theistic evolution (Aug. 18) — A common misconception floating about among Christians is that scientists, freethinkers and others “believe” in evolution the same way they believe in God or divine providence, and sometimes we slip into the misleading language in this way to describe our perception that evolution is a real process. Of course, this misunderstanding is essentially based on skewed semantics, as the word, “believe,” can be used to mean both something that a person takes on faith and a disputed piece of information that a person chooses to accept against the alternatives. …

On Sam Harris’ controversial essay on Israel (Aug. 5) — For all the intense criticism that has been hurled against neuroscientist Sam Harris for his recent essay, “Why Don’t I Criticize Israel?,” I think a lot of his naysayers, including Andrew Sullivan, P.Z. Myers, A Million Gods blog and others, missed the larger point. …

Who deserves to sit at the ‘adult table?’ (June 18) — I really wasn’t going to comment on the recent disagreement that seems to have erupted among folks in the online atheist community. …

Apologetic logic (April 15) — I’m glad this guy readily admits that believers’ “proof” in the afterlife amounts to nothing more than “clues” and “circumstantial evidence” because he sure did whiff on the rest of his argument, issuing one fallacy after another …

The Abrahamic dilemma (March 6) — Twitter was all a-bluster this week with a hoax — what a surprise? — about Ray Comfort and the story of Abraham sacrificing his son for God. A person named Martin Roberts supposedly asked Comfort whether he would be willing, like Abraham in the Bible, to kill his son to show his devotion. …

The failed Tea Party experiment (Feb. 12) — I’ve been writing about the Tea Party’s lunacies on here since the spring of 2009 (Here is my first substantive post about it). As I’ve tracked the trajectory of this experiment in political unrest, I think it’s safe to say the party is all but toast at this point, and here’s why. …

God, capriciousness and the 1 percent (Jan. 5) — The writer over at Skepticism First has proposed an interesting argument against the existence of God by supposing that we imagine a world in which Hurricane Katrina in all its fury actually killed 1 percent fewer people. …

Sye Ten Bruggencate versus a ham sandwich

I have to say, after hearing Sye Ten Bruggencate in several “debates” and learning more about this bizarre branch of Christian apologetics called presuppositionalism, I have to say he and his ilk make St. Augustine look like Friedrich Nietzsche. Case in point:

If you don’t want to watch the painful 13 minutes, much less the entire head-scratching debate, Bruggencate’s argument, in his own words, goes like this:

Why is it reasonable to believe that God exists? Quite simply because it’s true that he exists. Here’s my argument. Premise one: It’s reasonable to believe that which is true. Premise two: It’s true that God exists. Conclusion: Therefore, it’s reasonable to believe that God exists. … I say it’s true that God exists; therefore, it is true that God exists. My argument is sound, and the debate is over.

Wow, that was fast. He just singlehandedly solved thousands of years of religious debate and philosophical inquiry. I mean, Bruggencate says this with such force and so matter-of-factly, as if by merely saying words, any words whatsoever, in public, they become true. Here, let’s try it out.

Me:

Why is it reasonable to believe that Krishna exists? Quite simply because it’s true that he exists. Here’s my argument. Premise one: It’s reasonable to believe that which is true. Premise two: It’s true that Krishna exists. Conclusion: Therefore, it’s reasonable to believe that Krishna exists. I say it’s true that Krishna exists; therefore, it is true that Krishna exists. My argument is sound, and the debate is over.

Me again:

Why is it reasonable to believe that Osiris, god of the afterlife, exists? Quite simply because it’s true that he exists. Here’s my argument. Premise one: It’s reasonable to believe that which is true. Premise two: It’s true that Osiris, god of the afterlife, exists. Conclusion: Therefore, it’s reasonable to believe that Osiris, god of the afterlife, exists. I say it’s true that Osiris, god of the afterlife, exists; therefore, it is true that Osiris, god of the afterlife, exists. My argument is sound, and the debate is over.

Me a third time:

Why is it reasonable to believe that Hammy, Our Heavenly Lord of the Lunch, exists? Quite simply because it’s true that he exists. Here’s my argument. Premise one: It’s reasonable to believe that which is true. Premise two: It’s true that Hammy, Our Heavenly Lord of the Lunch, exists. Conclusion: Therefore, it’s reasonable to believe that Hammy, Our Heavenly Lord of the Lunch, exists. I say it’s true that Hammy, Our Heavenly Lord of the Lunch, exists; therefore, it is true that Hammy, Our Heavenly Lord of the Lunch, exists. My argument is sound, and the debate is over.

As easily as Bruggencate worked out the problem of God for us, I just singlehandedly willed into existence two gods and created a whole new one. Hey, this creating gods thing is kind of fun! Maybe I’ll make some more gods tomorrow. For now, let’s all offer up some prayers to Hammy, Our Heavenly Lord of the Lunch, and a new god I just felt like inventing 30 seconds ago, all hail Cutletzimasha, Almighty Ruler of the Roast. Do you dare doubt the existence of Cutletzimasha? If so, this should clear it up for you:

Why is it reasonable to believe that Cutletzimasha, Almighty Ruler of the Roast, exists? Quite simply because it’s true that he exists. Here’s my argument. Premise one: It’s reasonable to believe that which is true. Premise two: It’s true that Cutletzimasha, Almighty Ruler of the Roast, exists. Conclusion: Therefore, it’s reasonable to believe that Cutletzimasha, Almighty Ruler of the Roast, exists. I say it’s true that Cutletzimasha, Almighty Ruler of the Roast, exists; therefore, it is true that Cutletzimasha, Almighty Ruler of the Roast, exists. My argument is sound, and the debate is over.

My work here is done.

John 3:16 revisited

If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. − John 3:12-16, NKJV

***

Note: I am remiss to even add this disclaimer − and don’t plan on doing it in the future − but to my dismay some Christians have actually made the claim that since I sometimes speak about God as if he is real for the sake of argument, I must subconsciously or otherwise actually believe that he does exist. In this post, as in any other on the topic of religion, I am speaking about God as a character in the Bible and considering the implications if certain parts of Christianity are actually true, again, for the sake of argument.

John 3:!6

John 3:16

Now, with that out of the way, a few days ago I heard a Christmas commercial on the radio from a church, and a man said something to the effect of, “God loved us so much that he was willing to sacrifice his son,” which is basically a paraphrase of John 3:16.

This got me thinking about the first part of one of the most often-quoted versus in the Bible: “For God so loved the world.” Let’s stop there and go back way before any events of the Bible allegedly took place. Let’s go back to before the beginning when this almighty god was first hatching his plan to create a world, inhabit it with animals and conscious beings that would later be called man and woman.

How much did God really love the world? A quick revisiting of the story will show that either a) not all that much and quite possibly the converse of that or b) he had good intentions that somehow went awry as soon as the serpent showed up in the garden, an option that itself belies the very nature of an all-knowing, all-powerful God.

I’ll take second option first. Let’s assume that an autonomous God, for reasons we can’t possibly understand, wanted or needed some type of relationship with a new creation that couldn’t be supplied by those groveling angels. He wanted a relationship with a being that could choose whether to love him or not. Thus, he created man in the garden and endowed him with free will and the ability to think and act on his own. Now, God had man’s best interests at heart, so instead of simply removing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil from the Garden, he told them to avoid fruit from this tree because their lives will truly be worse if they were to become aware of evil and things like guilt, shame, etc. Presumably, he wanted his creation only to think on things that were good, which oddly enough, aligns quite well with preachments from the New Testament, particularly Philippians 4:8.

That’s admirable, I suppose, but it’s here where the disconnect begins. This all-powerful, all-knowing God truly wanted the best for his creation, yet he either allowed the devil to enter the garden or he simply missed the fact that the serpent had breached the gate. By the first option, God is evil and not as benevolent as we were led to believe. By the second, he is incompetent. So much for good intentions and omniscience.

But let’s ignore all that. Let’s assume that the Genesis story of creation is bunk and the god of the Bible simply guided the mechanism of evolution by natural selection and got us to the point in human history of Christ being born in the manger. “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son so that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.” This verse means that before sending Christ to earth, God had an immense amount of love for mankind, such that he was willing to watch his own son die a horrible death for the salvation of man. He loves the world so much, yet if you fail to be convinced by the so-called “evidence” of the Bible about Jesus or if you fail to believe the testimony of his followers, that immense love will, in the blink of an eye, turn to judgment and wrath.

If God really had this deep and abiding love for man, the loss of just one person in hell, much less billions of people in eternal torment, should be enough to make this deity weep for all time. Presumably if this love were genuine, he would do everything in his power to prevent the spiritual death of billions of people for whom he told us he was willing to sacrifice his only son. The New Testament tells us his love has one important condition, however, namely that people accept Jesus Christ as savior or perish forever.

The strange kind of love in John 3:16, a compulsory arrangement based on fear and shrouded in judgment, doesn’t even extend until the end of the sentence, much less past the tattered pages of the Bible.

Anita Sarkeesian and violence against women in video games

More than a year has passed since I have commented at any length on feminism and the issue of gender equality because frankly, the blog/YouTube wars and constant bickering between feminists, the men’s rights crowd and those who are somewhere in between made my head hurt. As such, I’m a little bit behind the curve in becoming aware of this Anita Sarkeesian person, who seems to have made quite a stir in the atheist and gaming community with her long-form videos about misogyny in gaming such as this one:

I recently became aware of her because of a recent interview she conducted with Stephen Colbert. While I have not watched all of her videos, I have watched “Damsel in Distress” parts one and two, in which she claims that the majority of action and adventure video games depict women as merely pawns or objects in male-centric narratives. Men, in her view — and she provides example after example — take the lead role in most of the games, with any females taking a backseat as secondary characters or love interests that the male character must rescue from certain doom because the females are disempowered, weak and incapable of saving themselves. In the first video in this series, Sarkeesian mainly focuses on two of Nintendo’s largest franchises, “Super Mario Bros.” and “The Legend of Zelda.” I was never as into Zelda, so I will focus on her critique of Mario Bros. As she recounts the story of the game, the princess, Peach, is captured by the villain, Bowser, and Mario must go through eight grueling levels to save her. Sarkeesian thinks that Mario, Zelda and other longstanding franchises that began decades ago could and should have been modernized to more robustly include strong women characters into the narrative.

First, as The Amazing Atheist pointed out, (and my linking to him doesn’t imply that I agree with him on every point) Mario and most of the other games she talks about follow the monomyth narrative structure, in which the protagonist begins the story in his or her everyday life, something unusual or bad happens and the hero goes on an adventure to right a wrong. Or, as Joseph Campbell put it:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

True, a majority of the action and adventure games that follow this structure feature a male protagonist and a female character that the male must either protect or rescue from peril. Like Mario, as in more modern games that follow this structure, the male typically goes through all sorts of dangerous challenges to protect the female because he either loves her or she is an important person.

Obviously, high-profile exceptions to this pattern exist within the gaming industry, but since they go all but unnoticed by Sarkeesian, I will briefly mention some here.

In many cases, like “Assassin’s Creed Black Flag” and “Red Dead Redemption,” female characters guide players through certain parts of the game and are imperishable parts of the storyline. Annie Stoakes, a cattle rancher and important character to the central story of “Red Dead,” competed in a gun duel tournament against male opponents. The game’s Wiki page had this to say about Stoakes:

Annie’s father did not adhere to the gender roles of the day: He raised his daughter to be a successful, independent rancher in a violent, male dominated society.

In “The Last Of Us,” the main character, Joel, lost his daughter 20 years before the main storyline begins. Through the early part of the game, he is accompanied by a female ass kicker named Tess, who helps him escape Boston. Through most of the rest of the game, Joel partners with a quick-witted and emotionally unflappable teenage girl named Ellie, who becomes an ass kicker in her own right.

In her two videos, Sarkeesian paints the impression that there are virtually no strong female protagonists in video games, now or in the past. While there are certainly fewer males than females in leading, playable characters in video games overall, which is probably because of the demographics of people who play action and adventure games and the demographics of those who development them, Sarkeesian conveniently fails to mention some prominent females that did actually command lead roles.

Metroid, which was another of Nintendo’s most popular franchises, follows the protagonist Samus Aran. In the first game in the series, players did not know until beating the game that the main character was, indeed, a female. This goes unmentioned in Sarkeesian’s analysis. More modern games that have featured woman in prominent and empowered roles, including the following:

  • Lara Croft, “Tomb Raider”
  • Chell, “Portal”
  • Aveline de Grandpre, “Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation”
  • FemShep, “Mass Effect”
  • Joanna Dark, “Perfect Dark”
  • Jill Valentine, “Resident Evil”

This doesn’t mention the countless number of strong female characters in the Final Fantasy series and other role playing games over the years. For more examples of lead female roles, see here:

In two videos that cover almost 50 minutes of content, Sarkeesian concedes that there has been a “moderate increase” in the number of lead female roles in video games recently, but can only be bothered to specifically mention two titles, “Beyond Good & Evil” and “Mirror’s Edge,” in 30 years of development. Also included in her list of games that disempower and objectify women was “Dante’s Inferno,” which I thought was a head-scratcher since the game is based off Dante’s “The Divine Comedy,” one of the greatest works of literature of all time, and in the game, the main character literally claws through the terrors of hell to save his love, Beatrice.

Sarkeesian does not seem like a person who is interested in presenting a fair picture of the video game market or even the entertainment market. Unlike Sarkeesian’s uneven presentation of the problem — and misogyny and violence against of women in video games is a problem, just as it is in real life — the video game industry has produced a number of strong, empowered female characters. I would be interested to know that if the roles were reversed and a large number of video games suddenly came out with female characters victimizing males and that somehow spoke to a larger problem in society, would Sarkeesian come to the defense of disempowered males? I should hope so, but for some reason, I’m not sure.

Of course, I wouldn’t care if she didn’t; I would just like to know if she’s at least willing to be consistent.

Last, I couldn’t help but wonder why Sarkeesian’s critique was limited to video games. If the problem of disempowering and objectifying women is prevalent in video games, it is certainly prevalent in movies and television, and perhaps it’s prevalent in the entertainment industry because it is, most unfortunately, prevalent everywhere. The problem, then, is not violence in video games, or even violence in movies and TV, but violence, abuse and objectification of human beings, male, female, gay, lesbian, black or white. Assholes and abusers will probably always exist, so I’m not here to offer a particularly optimistic view on stamping out all three of those anytime soon, but in this case, video games provide yet another example of art imitating life, not the other way around.

God cemetery

That headline doesn’t have quite the same ring as “Pet Cemetery.” In any case, H.L. Mencken once asked, “Where is the grave-yard of dead gods?”

As it happens, a couple were started last year, one by the North Georgia Skeptics Society:

Credit: North Georgia Skeptics Society

Credit: North Georgia Skeptics Society

And another by Atheists, Humanists, & Agnostics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

Credit: Atheists, Humanists, & Agnostics, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Credit: Atheists, Humanists, & Agnostics, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Most recently, a group from Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi. Here is a brief post from Reddit user Agnostic Atheist:

This is our own Graveyard. It’s not as big as a good one, but it still has a few dozen. Over night, some guys slightly vandalized our signs, with grammatical errors of course. It will be up all week up until Halloween this Friday. And a few of us at a time sit at the table to explain our club and promote discussions.

god graveyard1

godgraveyard2

If you haven’t read Mencken’s essay, “Graveyard of the Gods,” it’s well worth a look.

Myers reaches new level of arrogance

I actually sympathize with Coyne who seems to be scratching his head on this reaction from PZ Myers on Robin Williams’ death.

Here’s Coyne quoting Myers:

Here’s how you don’t respond to Williams death: as P.Z Myers has in a post at Pharyngula, in which he claims that the media (and our government) has taken advantage of Williams’s death to draw attention away from racism and other social problems. In other words, we’ve been manipulated:

 I’m sorry to report that comedian Robin Williams has committed suicide, an event of great import and grief to his family. But his sacrifice has been a great boon to the the news cycle and the electoral machinery — thank God that we have a tragedy involving a wealthy white man to drag us away from the depressing news about brown people.

. . . Boy, I hate to say it, but it sure was nice of Robin Williams to create such a spectacular distraction. No one wants to think the police might be untrustworthy. [This refers to the police shooting of black teenager Mike Brown in St. Louis.]

And think of the politicians! Midterm elections are coming up. Those are important! So people like Barack Obama need to be able to show their human side and connect with the real concerns of the American people by immediately issuing a safe, kind statement about Robin Williams, while navigating the dangerous shoals of police brutality and black oppression by avoiding them. Wouldn’t want to antagonize those lovely law-and-order folks before an election, you see.

Wealthy white man? Really? This is one of the most contemptible and inhumane things I’ve ever seen posted by a well-known atheist. It reeks of arrogance, of condescension, and especially of a lack of empathy for those who loved and admired Williams not because they knew him, but because he brought them happiness and made them think.

Well said. But I wonder if Coyne was caught off guard by Myers’ “arrogance” and “condescension,” which isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. Surely Coyne isn’t just now discovering that Myers’ comments often reek of arrogance and condescension. And atheists wonder why believers sometimes brand nonbelievers as close-minded pricks. Its because of assholes such as this.

Postscript: After sleeping on it and talking in the comments section, I had a few more thoughts on this. I think the point Myers was trying to make about the media milking Williams’ death was probably a legit gripe, but it was far overshadowed by the statement about “wealthy white men” and “it sure was nice of Robin Williams to create such a spectacular distraction,” which were particularly abhorrent. The man hung himself after a lengthy battle with depression and addiction and still managed to be one of the most beloved figures of our time; whatever the media and politicians hope to gain from his death is beside the point.