Get Over Your Fear of Atheism

For Faith and Belief.Every now and then, the religious just lay it out for all to see. From a proposed new topic: It's difficult to imagine how a scientific theory could lead someone to a loss of faith, given the backbends religion, with the infinite flexibility of a belief system based on wishful thinking, is capable of. Nonetheless I think the last sentence really lays it out - MPB1 genuinely chose to delude himself rather than accept atheism.I guess I'd like to know - why? As an atheist I can assure you - the water's fine. Giving up religion didn't turn my world upside down or leave me drifting in the wind. Drifting in the wind was what I was doing in religion, when I had "committed my life to Christ" and "turned the wheel over to God", as it were. I discovered, though, that when you "turn the wheel over to God", there's nobody in the driver's seat.Realizing that I was the one who had to steer - that I had to make a decision about what my life would be like and what I would become - gave me purpose where before I was aimless.Atheism - what's to fear, MBP1? It seems like you're spending a lot of time trying to twist the Bible into some kind of framework that superficially matches the scientific consensus; the problem is that you're trying to hit a moving target. As the consensus evolves and changes in the light of new information and evidence, you'll just wind up having to twist the Bible again.Does that strike you as an intellectually fulfilling endeavor? For that matter, go back to when you just decided what you wanted to believe - when you knowingly chose self-deception over what you suspected was true.How can that be a path to truth? How can wishful thinking lead to the truth?I'm not great at writing OP's; I'm a reactionary rather than proactionary thinker, I guess. And the way I reacted to your post was that it struck me how much your narrative sounded like a gay person struggling in the closet. "I don't want to come out!" he says to himself. "It's so much easier if people think I'm straight. Maybe I can convince myself that I'm not gay if I just try hard enough."I'm not gay myself, but I've come to understand what a truly crippling thing the closet is. It's crippling not to accept what you know to be true about yourself. It's crippling to reject a truth because you're afraid of what your spouse, or your children, or your community will think about you.When I read what you wrote there I wanted to reach out to you. It's clear that you have suspicions about atheism but also a great fear of what it means to become one of America's most hated and feared minorities. It's not easy because other people don't make it easy. But it doesn't mean that your kids won't grow up in a moral framework (and you should rethink your enthusiasm about trying to brainwash your kids in a faith you suspect isn't true.) It doesn't mean your spouse will abandon you. It doesn't mean you'll stop finding fellowship with your community and peers.I envision this as a thread where what it means to live as an atheist can be explored, and what, if anything, is lost or gained when the choice is made to abandon self-deception and embrace atheism. I feel that gaining a better understanding of what's real is worth it, and I don't recall losing anything in the choice that hadn't slipped away from me long before.

I don't know how to tell you this, Mike, but if you were still praying to God, then you weren't an atheist, were you?

Under one interpretation, sure.But the question is - what evidence is there that suggests the Bible is true? The only reason you seem to believe it is that you were raised to, and everybody you know believes that way.Those aren't good reasons. And if there's no good reason to accept the literal truth of the Bible on this matter, then you really don't have any reason to assume the Bible is any more true than anything else.

Well, I live in the same world as Larni, and I don't see anything supernatural about it. In fact it's well-known that no proponent of the supernatural has ever come forward with any evidence for it.

Then I don't understand what "supernatural" means, I guess.

M already converted himself. He's just stuck in a bind between what he knows is probably true and what he's willing to admit to himself.When a gay man tells another gay man not to live in the closet, he's not recruiting homosexuals. He's trying to help someone who's setting out on the same path he once walked. So too in this instance. Actually I can, as it turns out. Our beliefs are qualitatively different. And you can't exactly say that America is a hostile environment for Christians, you know. I never said that it was. It's certainly not for people who prefer comforting fictions to harsh realities. M doesn't strike me as that kind of guy. He wants to be, maybe, but he's not. This doesn't make any sense. To claim that God exists is to make an objective, verifiable claim. It's incoherent to suggest that God is nonexistent for me but exists for you. One or the other of us must be mistaken; there's no way we can both be right. We live in the same universe, after all. Either God exists or he doesn't, for both of us.

Oh, poor baby! I don't know how you poor believers survive. It must be so hard being disagreed with. I don't recall making a claim of ultimate knowledge. Your position appears to be that if I don't know everything with 100% accuracy, I don't know anything at all.

I'm sure the disdain of an anonymous stranger for the intellectually timid is such a hardship to bear. Try to keep in mind that the difference between me and him is that I couldn't be bothered to care what you find attractive. No, they're really not. If they were honest they'd admit that agnostics are atheists; that it's really just two different words for the exact same position - there's no good reasons that support the existence of God. Yes. Just as I would undermind the credibility of someone who thought they were Napoleon Bonaparte, the 18th century French general. Such a person shouldn't be put in a position to determine policy for others.Those who are committed to affirming positions for which there is no evidence aren't suited for policy, either. You seem to think that they'll restrain their believing-without-evidence to strictly religious matters.I don't. It's the easiest thing in the world to go from believing in God on the basis of no evidence, to believing something like "private accounts are better than Social Security" on the basis of no evidence. People who believe things, adamantly, on the basis of no evidence don't have a temperment suited to developing public policies that affect us all. If I had my way, they wouldn't be in a position to do so.But, hey, it's not up to me. And I'm not so naive as to assert that there's anybody at all who doesn't believe something on the basis of no evidence. It's a pernicious habit that, once, probably came in handy. But it's maladaptive in our current environment. So what you're saying is, you can make jokes, but you can't take them? I wonder why it is that so many people who rag on others complain so loudly when others rag on them.

I don't take nonsense seriously.I'm sorry if that makes me "heartless", but I don't have a lot of respect for somebody who comes to me with a big box of security blankets and says "here, pick the one you like best - and we'll all promise to pretend like it's true." Well, I'm not going to. If that makes me somebody that you don't want to talk about your security blanket with, great.People need to grow up. Only children need security blankets. Intellectual immaturity is a pretty dangerous condition in an age when one guy with a suitcase could level a city of millions. Why wouldn't they? People carry intellectual habits from one area to another.And I think the evidence of our society bears that out. It's not atheists who go to John Edwards shows. Look at the creationists here. Buzsaw believes in God - and that Big Pharma is out to poison us with pills that cost $100 to cure what you could cure for pennies with a few herbs. Herpeton believes in God - and that the pyramids, when analyzed with the "pyramid inch", contain numerically encoded prophecy about the End Times and the return of Christ. Tal believes in God - and that Iraq, despite the conclusions of every intelligence service in the world, actually had a functional nuclear weapons program and was responsible for the anthrax attacks on various Senate offices following 9/11. I'll bet you that the vast, vast majority of people who believe in the stories about the Bermuda Triangle - as well as the Philadelphia Project, Bigfoot, and that the Moon landing was a hoax - also believe in God. I never claimed that it was universally true. But the sort of person who believes, adamantly, in God - in an actual sky-person who takes a personal interest in your life, not in Spinoza's God, which is really just an expression of admiration for the natural universe - usually believes in a whole host of additional malarkey. (Like "the Bible is a truthful record of Jesus's ministry, authored by God.") And the reverse is almost always true: the people who swallow all that malarkey are almost always members of whatever religion is local. (In English-speaking countries, that would be Christianity.) As I said, it's not the atheists who go to John Edwards shows.

I didn't say that anybody was stupid. It's not an issue of intelligence, and I'll thank you not to misrepresent me. Stick with my arguments, ok? Don't go inventing your own to refute.The point is, though, that the religious make positive assertions on the basis of no evidence. Why is that something that we should respect? There's work to be done, and we need people to think clearly to do it. We need people to make decisions based on evidence, based on reasonable expectations about the consequences of their actions and decisions.Believing things based on no evidence doesn't give people the tools to do that. It's a habit that works against that. They're going to have to sack up and get over it. If you have a way to tell someone "you believe something based on no good evidence" that comes off in a better way than I've been phrasing it, I'd love to hear it.But if you're asking me to tell that person "oh, it's ok that you believe what you believe, we're all just the same" - that would be a lie. That isn't what I think at all. And lying and self-censoring ourselves to spare the religious the hardship - oh, the pain! - of just being disagreed with is what got us to the place we're at now: a place where educated architects fly planes into buildings to kill thousands, just because their religious leaders told them to.Religious people need to hear that their beliefs are wrong. I'm sorry if they find that offensive. It's often hard for a child to hear that Santa Claus doesn't exist, or that there's no such thing as the Tooth Fairy, but they need to hear it, eventually. People, eventually, need to grow up, and sometimes that requires hearing unpleasant truths. I'm not arrogant and I'm not hostile. The problem is that plain truths spoken plainly often appear arrogant and hostile, even though they're really not. But there's really nothing more humble than atheism.Arrogance is the certainty that the creator of the entire universe is a being with literally nothing else to do but keep an eye on you, occasionally break the laws of physics on your behalf, and who literally has no greater concern than where your penis is at any given time. There's no arrogance in the world like the breathtaking arrogance of the theist, who is convinced that the cosmic power of the universe is on his side. I used to be afraid to swim, until my dad picked me up and tossed me into the pool.I got over it. The way we get over our fears is to face them head-on - not to be sweet-talked out of them. There's no polite way to get someone to face their fears, because that's the reason these fears persist - they fester because people think it's rude to expect others to confront them. Again, please restrict your comments to what I've been saying, not to what you wish I was saying.I don't think creationists are stupid. I was hardly stupid myself when I was a creationist. (Ah, you didn't know that, did you? Kinda throws a monkey wrench in the works, doesn't it?) It's no more prejudiced than saying that black people, on the whole, get less sunburns. It's true by definition.We're talking about a group of people who adamantly believe something based on no good evidence. Certainly I believe that someone could believe something based on no good evidence without that habit creeping into other things he might believe - but that kind of psychic torsion isn't sustainable. People crave consistency. Ultimately, people resolve that tension, usually by adopting strategies that convince them that bad reasons are actually good ones. (We call a lot of these strategies "logical fallacies.)

Look, this is just ridiculous. This is merely the product of decades of religious propaganda that have trained you to see any atheist who doesn't treat faith with supreme reverence as "unhinged", "strident", and "fundamentalist." Look, when people are calling Richard Dawkins the voice of angry, out-of-control atheism (a man as inoffensive and congenial in person as Father Christmas), it's proof that religious people have stacked the deck against any atheist who dares to say anything to the religious but "yessa, Massa!"The typical discussion goes like this:Believer: I believe that the Bible is literally true and that gays and members of other religions are bound for hell, where they will be tortured for all eternity. And quite frankly, they deserve it, because they disgust me.Atheist: You know, pardon me for speaking, but I think you're wrong about those things.Believer: You know, the problem with all you goddamn atheists is how intolerant you are.It's ridiculous on the face of it. You've simply fallen for the manufactured outrage of the religious persecution complex.I ask you to ponder, just for a second - why is it that, in an age when disputes between religions are settled with bullets, bombs, and a deplorable loss of life, but the dispute between atheists and the religious is limited to books in bookstores; it's the atheists who are accused of being intolerant and of going too far?

No, I didn't. It really has nothing to do with intelligence. It has a lot to do with poor mental habits; habits that lead to conclusions based on bad or no evidence.People do it all the time. It's a known psychological effect (sometimes called "confirmation bias.") It's the reason that we developed the scientific method; a way for human beings to generate knowledge while minimizing the effect of our own bad mental habits. How many times do I have to say it has nothing to do with stupidity? I'm willing to admit that I haven't always been explicit on that, but now that I have been, twice, are you prepared to accept that you misinterpreted my remarks, or not? Well, tell me how to be "brutally honest but less hurtful." I'm open to suggestions.But my contention is that the religious have stacked the deck to the point where any honesty is viewed as "hurtful", and you're just playing along. At that point I can't really be held responsible for hurt feelings that emerge because the religious are trained to be hurt by truthful statements. Fair enough. Like I said I'm prepared to accept suggestions on how to moderate my tone. It would be helpful if you could use examples; perhaps, even fictitious dialogues.But when people like Sam Harris are accused of being "too forceful", "strident", and "hurtful", there's more going on here than just tone-deaf atheists. It's a campaign by the religious to characterize any intellectually honest treatment of religion as hate speech. Ok, that's fair enough. I'll give that a try sometime. Well, I don't make a secret of it; but I don't expect people to memorize my biography, either. I apologize for taking a somewhat unreasonable "gotcha" tone. We could both make an effort of trying to presume less about each other's motives. Sure, sure. But it seems to me that a lot of those coping mechanisms take the form of fallacious reasoning. In fact you could think of fallacious reasoning as a "coping mechanism" for dealing with the problem of wanting have an invalid argument accepted as true. I guess my view is that nothing convinces like success. I'm well aware that my tone makes it all but impossible for the person I'm directly replying to to feel like they have the freedom to change their mind without feeling a loss of face.But honestly, they're not the person I'm trying to convince (because usually, they can't be convinced.) I'm trying to reach the guy who doesn't even post; the guy on the sidelines. I'm playing to the audience (and that's part of the reason that I don't have these debates over email.)

Go fuck yourself, nutsack! You're right - that works great!