are you an atheist?

Ban Catholics from Africa. That would make the world a nicer place almost immediately.

Maybe we don't need a god, we need a mod.

our mod is an awesome mod

no you di'int! i'm excited for results

Here's my thing about the "wouldn't fix anything" argument -- yeah, people have a little dark murderous glint in their eyes, a lot of them do, sure. Maybe it's innate. But we have this amazing ability to tame ourselves, and while one of the arguments *for* organized religion is that it does exactly that, anchors us emotionally, gives us a built-in community, etc, it also carries a heavy burden of Time and Ritual and Tradition and Crazy Shit Your Parents Told You and whatnot. The thinking of the nun who tells dying people that God hates condoms is not far off from the cracker who believes that the Confederate flag is a proud thing to wave at people -- it's clinging to something you believe to be beyond yourself, and carrying that special feeling with you in your actions until Oops! you're doing something hideously ugly.

And science can do that, too, sometimes. God knows it has given us some horrible things. But that's because we're people and we fuck up, not because the whole belief system has been engineered to never change.

The fact that people are enlessly capable of doing "hideously ugly" shit with their seemingly good ideas has nothing to do with religion. People use religion as an excuse for all types of shit, but people are awful damn good at finding excuses. In that sense, religion is like any tool: inert until put to a specifit use. I'm sure that, in the absence of religion, people who wanted to fuck each other over would come up with something.

I.e., what kenan said.

we did this before and ILX was like 85% "nope, don't believe in god."

Must have been a weird poll title.

Yeah, I'm curious how that'll work out. The results, I mean. Bcz I get a feeling there'll be a lot of "no" but I am more curious about the 'yes.' A lot of circles of friends I've been in, it's been kind of a shock when someone says they believe in god. Not that they get mistreated or mocked or whatevs, but it's always a surprise reveal. So maybe more of my buds wld say 'yes' in the option of anonymity? Or maybe we are all just godless.

Except when my boyfriend told me he believed in Jesus about two years ago and I had a crying jag/panic attack.

"not because the whole belief system has been engineered to never change."

religion changes quite a bit though. right along side cultural changes, it does. along every step of the way, superstrata is there justifying our gut moves. people are afraid that if their boys are gay, we'll be weak and get destroyed... but NO... it's hot man sex and destroying marriage that they complain about because they've got ritualistic/tradition/tabooculture to back up their gut.

even outside that, theology changes all the time. typically speaking, christian theology is about one step behind popular culture. i can't speak for other religions. but look at the increasing discussion of post-modernism in churches now. it's happening just as most academics wouldn't bother to be talking about that anymore. and it cuts right back to slavery debates or bigger the birth of protestantism... and even further back to the establishment of biblical cannon, etc etc.

it's a work in progress. hello... most interpretation is just that... exegetical... we bring our baggage in, mingle it with the text and whallah, "it's means JELLO SHOTS FOR COMMUNION!"

theology is our man made interpretation. it's our dim view of the greater whole truth ... the physical cosmology which may or may not include an actual God in the mix. if God's in there, he's deeper than the bullshit preached every sunday (or whenever's appropriate).

Except when my boyfriend told me he believed in Jesus about two years ago and I had a crying jag/panic attack.

-- Abbott, Wednesday, 21 May 2008 22:00 (27 minutes ago) Link

omg i would have too

He doesn't really, anymore.

if we're talking about absolute atheism ("i am certain that there is no intelligent higher power") then i vote no, but if we're talking about just "i do not actively believe in god(s)" then i vote yes.

I'm sure that, in the absence of religion, people who wanted to fuck each other over would come up with something.

no doubt but isn't the point that religion creates a scenario where people who wouldn't otherwise want to fuck people, constantly fuck people over?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

mhmm

no doubt but isn't the point that religion creates a scenario where people who wouldn't otherwise want to fuck people over, constantly fuck people over?

Except for divisions of wealth/power/resources, of course. Those are the REAL reasons people fuck each other over.

Except for divisions of wealth/power/resources, of course. Those are the REAL reasons people fuck each other over.

Right. No religion ever played a part in *that* part of history. Nope, never. Nothing but love. ;)

religion changes quite a bit though... it's a work in progress.

I suppose you got me on a technicality there, but it would be extraordinarily disingenuous to suggest that religions change because they are such pliable, adaptive institutions. Yes, of course they change -- under pain of death. Don't we all. There are progressive religions, and I know there are some exceptions, but typically they change at roughly the rate that trees grow knots around barbed wire fences. Saying that they are "about one step behind popular culture" is not the most impressive boast I have ever heard, either. "Popular culture" is still trying to find a way to let boys kiss each other without angina. So they're slower than that? That's the fat kid in gym class, man.

Not only am I an atheist, I'm an ELITIST!:)

yes. i assert my superiority by reference to the advantages of my athe.

I think we've picked up some believers since the last poll.

Or at least some people who are not prepared to deny the possible existence of a something for fear that they might not get invited to the after death party.

I would not want to belong to any after-death party that would not have me for a member.

Love hedge-betting beliefs. :)

Actually I don't so much.

Someone in a church talk once said, "When the boat's sinking, the atheists are always the first ones to pray to God!" I do not understand this statement. Mainly I want to know why they shoved a bunch of atheists onto a boat...?

i hate it when i'm like really upset about something and i start whispering "please god, please." remnants of my grandmother's insanity.

My mom has similar: 'everyone's a Catholic in the Emergency Room.' NB she is not a member of any church.

Oh my gosh how will I know which saint's day it is if I'm in the ER?

Saints pocket calender. You can grab one in the emergency room gift shop. They keep those stocked, because they know that everyone is a Catholic in the emergency room.

Last time I was in the emergency room, I not only became Catholic, but also Mexican. Took days to wear off. I still have a box of $1 Jesus candles somewhere.

Haha, did you force your female cousins to have a lard-smearing tamal-making day?

ew

'everyone's a Catholic in the Emergency Room.'

In pr0n too!

(friends tell me)

oh geez

foxholes, too.
i think these old saws work against religion, actually. doesn't it show that people just want something to cling to in the face of impending death?

ya

All I know is, I'm sweatin' like a whore in church.

I think we've picked up some believers since the last poll.

Non-atheists =/= believers

It's one of those things that doesn't at all matter to me if it's fake or not because it is so perfect that it's basically true, to me.

-- Abbott, Friday, May 23, 2008 3:56 PM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

It's perfect, perfect, perfect either way. If something makes my heart completely soar, its reality is only negligibly important.

-- Abbott, Friday, May 23, 2008 3:56 PM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

True even with little stuff. I once heard that every member of Devo are the same height-- Is it true? I dunno, but either way what an neat rumor. Gets a smile out of me. la la-la.

-- RabiesAngentleman, Friday, May 23, 2008 4:17 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

Bahaha, if only there was a religion based on a 13-year-old boy getting hookers to play Xbox with him.

^^^ unitarianism

It feels too much like group counseling, their meetings.

I've always been curious about them. Skeptical, though. Sounds more like a club than a religion.

My parents were Unitarians for a while. Seemed like a boring liberals hang out on Sunday club.

I liked the Unitarian church that my parents took me to in high school, after we all swore off Catholicism. But I think it's the sort of thing where it's very much dependent on the minister and the congregation. I went to another Unitarian service in college, which was out of state, and it sort of rubbed me the wrong way. Also, even at the place my parents went, they discouraged anyone under 18 from attending the main service and had Sunday school instead. I went for a couple weeks, and we were actually assigned to read Catcher in the Rye, lol (which we were reading that year in high school anyway) -- so I went back to the main congregation. But yeah, it's the kind of place where you can get away with "A reading from Robert Fulghum's Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten."

My parents went to the Unitarian church for a while but got mad and left when they skipped Easter in their attempt to include all other types of spring holidays. They're less religious than I am, but attached more to their cultural background, I think.

Unbelievers think that skepticism is their special virtue, the key virtue believers lack. Bolstered by bestselling authors, they see the skeptical and scientific mind as muscular thinking, which the believer has failed to develop. He could bulk up if he wished to, by thinking like a scientist, and wind up at the “agnosticism” of a Dawkins or the atheism of a Dennett—but that is just what he doesn’t want, so at every threat to his commitments he shuns science.

That story is almost exactly the opposite of the truth.

Men of Truth

The story is right about virtue: The smoothly muscled skeptical-scientific mind is a gorgeous thing—picture the Apollo of Olympia, a poised young athlete in a throng of centaurs, passion-driven half-men. Science is a virtue: a perfection of the human creature gifted with a mind, a use of the mind that, says Aquinas, “perfects the speculative intellect for the consideration of truth.” But to be “men of truth,” in the words of Exodus, is to be vulnerable to truth.

Richard Dawkins speaks as a genuine scientist when he insists, “What I care about is what’s true; I want to know, is there a God in the universe or not?” Perfect. Truth is awaiting you, with its painful grip.

But on the question around which Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Grayling, Onfray, and voices still to come are now springing up—the question of God—the successor of Apollo is not the atheist or the agnostic. Both lack the great virtue of the scientist, the skeptical virtue. Here they are the hankerers after comfort, the scrawny ones who prefer their own commitments over reason.

No matter how excellent these thinkers might be on other questions, on this question they nimbly shift their allegiance: Between the life they like and the demands of vocation (submission to the question), they choose their lives—ironically, the very failing for which they ridicule believers. A seeker of truth has to go where the truth can be found, and to go on until it is found, and both the atheist and the agnostic are early quitters.

Dawkins is right that “the question of the existence of God or gods, supernatural beings, is a scientific question,” straight from the mind hungry for truth. On that question, the path of the scientist was shown to us at the dawn of modernity by a consummate scientist: Blaise Pascal. Here was a scientific mind that brushed aside the medieval proofs of God (which did nothing for him) to attack the question anew.

People may think it just an odd coincidence that the author of the Pensées, a work of apologetics, also came up with Pascal’s law, on the transmission of pressure in confined liquids, but one mind seeking one thing generated both. Pascal was a lifelong seeker of truth: “I should . . . like to arouse in man the desire to find truth, to be ready, free from passion, to follow it wherever he may find it,” he says in Pensée 119. But the scientists who have asked Pascal’s question after him are rarely scientist enough for that.

They do not follow truth wherever they may find it. On the topic they have promised to illuminate, they are the defenders of Ptolemy in the age of Galileo: resisters and avoiders of scientific thought inflexibly wedded to their own commitments; and it is not hard to show this.

The Skeptical Theist

There are skeptical theists; Pascal was one. Skepticism and theism go well together. By a “skeptic” I mean a person who believes that in some particular arena of desired knowledge we just cannot have knowledge of the foursquare variety that we get elsewhere, and who sees no reason to bolster that lack with willful belief.

“Believing is not something you can decide to do as a matter of policy,” as Dawkins says—though it is odd that he does so in a discussion of Pascal, who, like him, is a skeptic. A complete misunderstanding of Pascal, however, is crucial to the way that Dawkins and every one of his fellows (past and future) always think.

Evidence is just not available to demonstrate the existence of God, said Pascal, who called himself one of those creatures who lack the humility that makes a natural believer. In that, he was of our time: We are pretty much all like that now. Three hundred and fifty years ago he laid out our situation for us: Modern man confronts the question of God from the starting point of skepticism, the conviction that there is no conclusive physical or logical evidence that the God of the Bible exists.

“I have wished a hundred times over that, if there is a God supporting nature, nature should unequivocally proclaim him, and that, if the signs in nature are deceptive, she should suppress them altogether”—but nature prefers to tease, so she “presents to me nothing which is not a matter of doubt” (429). “We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty” (401). “We are . . . incapable of knowing . . . whether he is” (418). This is where the modern person usually starts in his assault on the question, Is God real or imaginary?

This is base camp, above the tree-line of convincing reasons and knock-down arguments, at the far edge of things we can kick and see, and it is all uphill from here. Thus, it is astounding how many Dawkinses and Dennetts, undecideds and skeptical nay-sayers—that sea of “progressive” folk who claim to “think critically” about religion and either “take theism on” or claim they are “still looking”—who have not reached the year 1660 in their thinking. They almost never pay attention to what the skeptic Pascal said about this enquiry.

Instead, the dogmatic reflex, ever caring for human comfort, has flexed and decided the question already, has told them what to believe in advance of investigation and rushed them back to the safety of life as usual.

The modern thinking person who rightly touts the virtues of science—skepticism, logic, commitment to evidence—must possess the lot. But agnostics are not skeptical, half the atheists are not logical, and the rest refuse to go where the evidence is. None measures up in these modern qualities to Pascal.

A Hidden God?

Pascal says that from base camp we must try to find a non-dogmatic route of assault upon the question. Think about it logically, he says. If we do not know that God even exists, we hardly know how he behaves. So we cannot begin this ascent with any dogmatic presumption about his behavior.

Maybe, if he exists, God would show himself directly to our senses. But maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would hide from us—maybe he is a Deus absconditus, Pascal says, following Isaiah 45: “Truly, thou art a God who hidest thyself.” What evidence do we have by which to rule that out? We can’t be dogmatic, can’t say that God is this way or that way: Everything possible is possible.

But we have, in fact, already tested one hypothesis about how God behaves: that he shows himself directly to our senses. That is what got us up here past the tree-line in the first place. We now have evidence for a conclusion that all our fellow seekers of truth ought to draw: Either God does not exist or he exists but does not show himself to our senses.

Our skepticism rejects the likelihood that things we can see will resolve our doubts; that is progress already made. The Humean idea so nicely put by Carl Sagan—that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”—was hardly worth resurrecting, given that it was passé before Hume was in diapers. “If this religion boasted that it had a clear sight of God and plain and manifest evidence of his existence, it would be an effective objection to say that there is nothing to be seen in the world which proves him. . . . But . . . on the contrary it says that men are in darkness. . .” (427).

A hundred years earlier, Pascal had already ruled empirical theism a dead end, a foolish hope for what we ought by now to know we were not going to get: clear material evidence of clearly immaterial being. By 1660 there were only two options left: Either God does not exist or he is not a gift to our senses.

Pascal the skeptic has ruled out a fruitless path, the path to God via logic or concrete evidence: the easy route to the summit, sought for centuries but never found. The only way forward is up from where we are, onto the icy slopes out past the limit of concrete evidence. If that is possible.

At this point, of course, the venture is not looking especially promising. The mind is made for hard evidence. It gets traction on rough ground, but what stretches before us is sheer ice (minds are not issued with crampons). Is there a way forward?

That is now the question. If we care about the truth more than we care about some favored means of data-collection, we need to discover whether there is any other way, up here where the air is thin and the ice treacherous, that a rational person could settle the question of God.

The Instrumental Heart

When the smart scientist of the seventeenth century was asked, “Is clear water pure?” he did not go with his gut and answer “yes” or “no.” “The naked eye says yes,” he answered, “but is there an instrument better than the naked eye with which to see?” We need to listen to the scientist who claims that there is, and that scientist is Pascal.

That instrument is the heart. “It is the heart which perceives God, and not the reason” (424). “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know” (423). Pascal’s reasons of the heart are meant to take over from an intellect that operates on hard evidence but has run out of it. “The heart has its order, the mind has its own, which uses principles and demonstrations. The heart has a different one” (298).

We are not talking here about feelings, which love to cheat us. Pascal says that the heart convinces, makes us rightly sure. “Demonstration is not the only instrument for convincing us” (821).

Many of his readers miss this, and so see him as preparing us to leap—but conviction is not a leap. Dawkins takes him to say that when the evidence runs out, you just throw in your lot with belief in God, because that is logically prudent; he credits Pascal with “the ludicrous idea that believing is something you can decide to do.” But the heart, Pascal is saying, is not a springboard to choice; it charts a path to conviction about God. It is not all done for us by logic and by sight. There is still the reasoning of the heart.

The scientist Pascal claims to know a route that will take us over the ice to convincing discovery. It is the refusal to test his thinking that betrays the faith of atheists and agnostics.

No no, they will say, point to something material on which to base belief and then I will look at it. “Give us solid evidence!” They insist that every belief about reality must be accepted on the basis of evidence (“experience or logic”). On what basis do they accept that? Evidence? But there is none.

There is no evidence at all that everything reality might contain can be apprehended by this faculty or that one, this instrument or that. There is no reason at all to pick a horse, except as a matter of hope or “mood and attitude” (the impulses, atheists explain, of religion, by contrast with science).

But atheists and agnostics pick. They commit in the absence of evidence. They never fail to stew at “the weary old canard that atheism is ‘a faith proposition,’” but “commitment to a belief in the absence of evidence supporting that belief” is their own definition of faith, and that is what they do.