Agnosticism in America

Not too many surprises here:

agnosticism in america

Source: Gallup/The Atlantic

California, the Northwest and Northeast are the most irreligious parts of the nation, while the Southeast is the most religious. Of course, the correlation between poverty with religion is well-documented in the world, and with a few exceptions like parts of California, this trend holds at the state level inside the U.S. I would venture to say the same can be said for dichotomies like religion/academic performance and religion/social justice.

For Squirrels: What a shame

I loved this band from back in the day. They were solid songwriters.

From Wikipedia:

The band’s original lineup consisted of vocalist (Jack) Vigliatura, bassist (Bill) White, guitarist Travis Tooke, and drummer Jay Russell. Explaining their name, the band had said that they were so committed to being in a band, they would play music “for squirrels.” The group played jangly alternative rock akin to R.E.M., one of their prime influences, with heavier moments alluding to the sound of grunge rock and Nirvana. …

On September 8, 1995, while returning from playing the CMJ Music Marathon in New York City, the band was involved in the auto accident that killed Vigliatura, White, and Bender. Griego and Tooke suffered multiple injuries but survived the crash. The album was released as planned. The single “Mighty K.C.”, about the death of Kurt Cobain, was a minor hit and continued to drive album sales.

Here is my favorite For Squirrels song, “8:02 PM”

And my second favorite, “Disenchanted:”

So much potential lost. But it’s all in God’s good plan. Keep believing that.

Why live?

I found this little anecdote on Reddit and thought it pretty aptly answers the questions that is often posed to nonbelievers: If you believe that death is really the end, what is the point of life? Here is the way yoyoslender explained it to his religious friend:

He asked what i thought would happen when we die. I told him that we would cease to exist, no thoughts or movement or anything of the sort. He then asks me what the point would be if that were true. He said, “if we dont have anything to live for, why live?” I thought for a bit, and remembered how much he loves minecraft. So i said that it is like hardcore mode in minecraft. He seemed confused. I said, “if everything is lost when you die, then why play hardcore mode?” He responded, “to see how far you can go before dying.” “That’s atheism.”

Splendid.

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On deconversion

This clip with Matt Dillahunty details nearly my precise experience with deconversion (forward to about 3:45 through 8:00):

When all the evidence from the Bible, early Christian writings, theology, Jewish historians and philosophy falls, the only thing believers have left is the case from faith, which, as Dillahunty notes, can be applied to the belief in anything, from Christ to Shiva to Xenu to Isis to Horus to Osiris to the great and benevolent FSM.

What people like Dillahunty find is that because they care enough to try to figure out whether their beliefs are actually true or not, they are met with the following choice: to continue the ruse of belief just to make themselves and other people happy, in other words, to be a hypocrite, or the only other option, to be genuine about how they really think and feel. I realize some nonbelievers must continue the ruse out of fear of reprisal, threats, etc. (and that is unfortunate in and of itself), but extenuating circumstances aside, people, like Dillahunty and myself who find themselves in that chasm between faith and nonbelief usually decide to give up the ruse because it is the only ethical position to take.

They Don’t Believe Because Your God Isn’t Desirable Tenable

Scott McKnight over at the Jesus Creed blog on patheos.com has posted a piece titled, “They Don’t Believe Because Your God Isn’t Desirable” by Jeff Cook, who makes the case that the reason more people are becoming unbelievers these days is not because atheists are carrying arguments with logic but because believers are not touting the desirability of belief in God.

Cook said that during a debate between that stalwart of all things rational, William Lane Craig, and neuroscientist, Sam Harris, he said that for part of the debate, he thought Craig was winning, but Harris began getting off topic and addressing other things like “the problem of religious diversity, the problem of pain, reflections on the character of God in the Bible,” and Cook then thought Harris was winning. He said Craig didn’t really identify reasons that someone might want to believe in God. Presumably, since the topic of the debate was about morality, had Craig spoken on the desirability of faith, that too would have been off topic.

In any case, Cook then calls the new atheists “hopelessly naïve about ethics and epistemology” (Epistemology? Really?!?) and says that non-believers are winning the argument because people like Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, etc., specialize in ridicule:

And that means the new atheists excel on the only evangelistically – effective playing field that matters — that of human emotion and desire. Most Christian apologists conversely seem content to surrender that ground in their preference for mere rationality.

Not to mention the fact that Christians have been taking advantage of human emotion (fear of hell) and desire (hope of heaven) for 2,000 years, did Cook just really suggest that believers have been previously “content” to use arguments based in rationality? So let me get this straight: a fantastically complex being existing in some other realm with a host of angels and human souls, a god who is nonetheless able to crash through our atmosphere and interact with millions of people simultaneously, is an argument that believers can make on rational grounds?

But Cook goes further:

We have not established that Christianity should be revered, nor that it is attractive, nor that it is worthy of affection. We prefer to pull out our five proofs for its “truth” and argue our misguided interlocutors into the Kingdom cold.

I do agree that believers have not showed that Christianity should be revered, but I think many non-believers will agree that there’s not much worth revering in a god who is obsessed with blood sacrifice and who is so uncreative that he couldn’t have thought of a more humane way to satiate his thirst for red blood cells than by slaughtering innocent animals, and later, an innocent human.

If Cook had actually read Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, John Loftus, former pastor Dan Barker, John Dominic Crossan and many others, he would know that these writers do present concrete, reasoned arguments for why there is almost certainly no god and why Jesus most likely did not utter all of the things attributed to him in the New Testament. In fact, in Dawkins case, the evidence against a god was so clear to him that between 1 (100 percent sure that there was a god) to 10 (100 percent sure that there isn’t), he was solidly at 9.5. Loftus, a former pastor, makes about as exhaustive a case against God as I have ever read in “Why I Became An Atheists,” and in parts, even addresses some of Craig’s tired arguments, while Crossan in “The Historical Jesus” dissects the gospels verse-by-verse to uncover which parts are probably original and which were embellishments or later additions.

To my knowledge, Hitchens is the only one of the “new atheists” who was an active and vocal anti-theist. Most of the rest, at one time or another, wanted the biblical stories, God, Christ, etc., to all be true but when faced with the evidence, or the lack thereof, simply could not believe.

There is one final part in Cook’s essay that needs addressing. Near the conclusion, he had this to say:

One must want God to exist in order to become a follower of Jesus, and as such, it is time for a radical rethinking of apologetics that begins where nearly all of Jesus’ pitches for the Kingdom began—with human longing (consider, for example, the Beatitudes).

I think that is exactly the other way around. Assuming that Christ is real, the advantages of belief are clear: the hope of heaven and a new “spiritual” life, less fear in this life and strength in times of need. People want a reason to believe; for many, the desire is already there. However, praying every night for decades without hearing or feeling any sense of a god and then objectively investigating the claims of the Bible and finding that your faith was built out of sand might be powerful reasons to give up belief. This is the path so many people, like Loftus and Barker have taken. I would imagine that it might, indeed, be time for a “radical rethinking of apologetics” here in the year 2012. Because all the arguments that apologetics has put forward thus far have failed. (I addressed many of them in this series: Response to Apologetics I: faith, reason, the purpose driven life.)

The desirability of faith, strong as it is, might be all that religion has left.

An atheist’s sermon

Thanks to Reasonable Doubts and Jeremy Beahan for providing this. The following is a description of a sermon delivered by Beahan on Dec. 11, 2011 at All Souls Unitarian Church:

Those who reject religion go by many names; atheist, agnostic, skeptic, freethinker, secular humanist–but please do not call us “unbelievers.” If you ask you will find there are many things we believe in. We believe that the natural world, as revealed through science, is more beautiful and inspiring than any mythology. But a world without the supernatural also confronts us with disturbing possibilities. If there is no God then the human story comes with no guarantee of a happy ending. Humanity must solve it’s [sic] own problems but it’s not at all clear we are up to the task. If there is hope, it will be found in those who reject the hollow consolations of faith and choose to press on instead of hoping for a miracle. By living with courage and integrity, pursuing truth for truth’s sake, we can make our lives and our world significant.

Here is the actual text in PDF form and the audio: audio of the sermon.