My hearty thanks for being given the chance to contribute. For those who don’t know me (and most don’t), you can get a feel for who I am and what I’ve been up to lately here (link). I’m looking forward to shining some additional light on one of the more dangerous worldviews espoused by mankind. That’s not silly sentiment on my part; history cries out against the conclusions that atheism inevitably leads to. There’s a long list of reasons to treat atheism with skepticism. Hopefully, I’ll be able to add my two cents’ worth in respect to all of them before long.+/-
Continue reading Hello and Thank You!...
6/28/08
6/26/08
The Great Debate: AiD vs. De-conversion.com
Here
Now all of you can see why I've been so busy lately. Hope you enjoy it as it unfolds this week.
Continue reading The Great Debate: AiD vs. De-conversion.com...
Now all of you can see why I've been so busy lately. Hope you enjoy it as it unfolds this week.
Continue reading The Great Debate: AiD vs. De-conversion.com...
6/24/08
6/21/08
GREETINGS!
Sup good people! I'm Netlosh, but my mother calls me Shelton.
I'm honored, excited, and a bit nervous about having been asked to contribute. Nervous only because I'm not all that sure how I'll approach this yet, but I'm confident we'll think of something.
As some of you may be aware, previously I could've been found dropping in and mixing it up with a few atheist around here and AS (and some 'Christians' too come to think of it), so I'm not a total stranger around these parts. I did, however, want to formally introduce myself, and make explicit a few things that may (or may not, who knows?) have been missed or overlooked in the 'heat of battle'.
+/-
Continue reading GREETINGS!...
I'm honored, excited, and a bit nervous about having been asked to contribute. Nervous only because I'm not all that sure how I'll approach this yet, but I'm confident we'll think of something.
As some of you may be aware, previously I could've been found dropping in and mixing it up with a few atheist around here and AS (and some 'Christians' too come to think of it), so I'm not a total stranger around these parts. I did, however, want to formally introduce myself, and make explicit a few things that may (or may not, who knows?) have been missed or overlooked in the 'heat of battle'.
+/-
I am the 3rd child, 2nd son of a Pastor (I have 4 brother's and 3 sister's all by the same parents). I am African-American (or just Black). I am a Christian and I absolutely love God and people. In my regular day to day I have pretty consistently exhibited the apparently unusual ability to get along with a wide variety of people of various persuasions and backgrounds, all without yielding any ground in my own convictions. Politically, I consider myself an independent with conservative values (which basically means I'll vote for whomever I agree with the most, despite their party affiliations).
I do like to read a bit. I'm a pretty big fan of Kant, Burke, and Weber. Niall Ferguson, Paul Johnson, David Landes, and Thomas Sowell are among the few authors that I'd spend my last 20 bucks on. I pray for the day's when I'll have the time to pour through the articles of J.P. Holding and Glen Miller (my personal two favorite internet apologist). Among the many theologians I do enjoy from time to time, I've personally been the most challenged, enlightened, and generally enriched by the writings Charles Finney(even though some have called him a heretic). None of these people I agree with 100%, but life has taught me to either chew the meat and spit out the bones, or be prepared to starve...
I don't hold to convictions I don't believe I can defend, and will NOT defend stuff I don't believe in. I like to keep things as simple and unpretentious as possible, but I insist on being thoroughly sound both logically and factually. I endeavor to remain pretty easy going throughout it all.
When soundly corrected I'm pretty quick to adjust accordingly. I can NOT stand being wrong, and therefore whenever driven to realize that I am, you'll find that I won't waste time in any vain attempts to save face. Charles Finney said, "True Christian consistency consists, not in stereotyping our opinions and views and in refusing to make any improvement in knowledge lest we should be guilty of change, but it consists in holding our minds open to receive the rays of truth from every quarter, and in changing our views and language and practice as often and as fast as we can obtain further information. I call this Christian consistency because this course alone accords with a Christian profession. A Christian profession implies the profession of candor and of a disposition to know and to obey all truth."
Thank you M for the invite. I look forward to seeing where we all go from here.
Agape'
Continue reading GREETINGS!...
6/17/08
6/16/08
Hello
My name is Stan and I am a recovered Atheist.
It is an honor to be invited to contribute to this blog. Some background on myself: For 40 years I was an Atheist. During those decades I never bothered to analyze the Atheist position from a logical point of view. It seemed so obvious, so simply derived and easily maintained. It was not until my retirement that I took the time to think these things through. I discovered that despite my degrees and my career in R&D, I did not have a complete education. So I set about studying, first the source and use of logic and rational thought. Then I applied that to my chosen belief, Atheism. What I found, I now post to my own website and blog, as an analysis of Atheism from a logic and rational thought perspective, without recourse to theism or deism. If Atheism is a robust, logical philosophy, it should welcome and readily withstand such self analysis, should it not? Of course it should, but does it?
First I'd like to share some of the things I have learned about Atheism.
What is Atheism, Really?
Atheism is not just “absence of belief” in a deity, nor is it just “belief in the absence” of deity. Some Atheists have redefined Atheism to fit their own needs, just as some BOB Christians have redefined Christianity to fit their own needs. Atheism has more aspects than just these basic definitions.
I’m not here to fence an endless semantic duel with foils of definitions. I will, however, tell about Atheism from the inside and the outside. Hereafter I will assume that the term Atheism refers to an absolute knowledge that there is no deity, and that agnosticism refers to any doubt concerning the probability of the matter of a deity. But agnosticism in not the subject; Atheism is.
+/-
Continue reading Hello...
It is an honor to be invited to contribute to this blog. Some background on myself: For 40 years I was an Atheist. During those decades I never bothered to analyze the Atheist position from a logical point of view. It seemed so obvious, so simply derived and easily maintained. It was not until my retirement that I took the time to think these things through. I discovered that despite my degrees and my career in R&D, I did not have a complete education. So I set about studying, first the source and use of logic and rational thought. Then I applied that to my chosen belief, Atheism. What I found, I now post to my own website and blog, as an analysis of Atheism from a logic and rational thought perspective, without recourse to theism or deism. If Atheism is a robust, logical philosophy, it should welcome and readily withstand such self analysis, should it not? Of course it should, but does it?
First I'd like to share some of the things I have learned about Atheism.
What is Atheism, Really?
Atheism is not just “absence of belief” in a deity, nor is it just “belief in the absence” of deity. Some Atheists have redefined Atheism to fit their own needs, just as some BOB Christians have redefined Christianity to fit their own needs. Atheism has more aspects than just these basic definitions.
I’m not here to fence an endless semantic duel with foils of definitions. I will, however, tell about Atheism from the inside and the outside. Hereafter I will assume that the term Atheism refers to an absolute knowledge that there is no deity, and that agnosticism refers to any doubt concerning the probability of the matter of a deity. But agnosticism in not the subject; Atheism is.
+/-
Reasons for Atheism
Atheism can be handed down just like Boogie-man theory and leprechaun tales. But it is usually acquired as a result of adolescent rebellion against authority. This normal youthful rebellion, when gone astray, leads to long term rejection of all sorts of authority including ecclesiastical and theological. Rebellion can become endemic and work its way into a life-long worldview. This can be accompanied by the pride of elitism and the denial of first principle based logic, resulting in logical inversion(1). So there exists a push-pull, where the push is away from authority, and the pull is elitism; the movement toward rejection is lubricated with inverted or non-rational thought processes. This is seductive to the young and impressionable because it seems to help implement their desires and overcome their insecurities. It worked well for me, on that superficial level of non-examination.
The logical inversion starts with declaring the once valued protectors to now be evil. The inversion continues through the use of rationalization in lieu of logic, where the conclusion is determined first and evidence is selected to support that conclusion. This is the point where the unspoken presupposition drives the logic, inverting it. It is irrational.
Atheism and the Developmental Environment
The protracted rebellion is especially true of the progeny of missing or weak fathers, as shown by the historical analysis done by psychiatrist Paul Vitz, in his work, “Faith of the Fatherless”. This review of famous Atheist philosophers revealed the rebellion / rejection principle at a rate of 100%: Famous Atheists(2) had weak, defective or missing fathers, and were raised under the auspices of females. The resulting feminization of the child results in anger at both the feminizing mother, and the absent father (male role model). The child angrily rejects these two authority figures and continues to reject authority throughout life. The attempt to justify this rejection of authority results in evangelical fervor in the resulting Atheism and in their lifelong anger: misery loves company. Some schools of thought relate Asperger’s Syndrome with Atheist behavior, and an informal, non-binding, non-scientific on-line poll found a higher degree of such behavior amongst self-proclaimed Atheists than non-Atheists. (3)
Atheism and Science
Atheism is camouflaged in an aura of logic from which it derives a faux respectability. Science is a favorite lever for Atheists because the voluntary materialism to which empiricism subjects itself is so similar to the philosophical materialism of Atheism. So Atheism co-opts science for its own sub-worldview and tries to act as if its own philosophy is scientifically verifiable. In actuality, science has nothing to say about those things which it cannot measure, including deities. So science does not reject non-material reality, it merely does not pretend to investigate it. It is Philosophical Materialism that rejects non-material reality.
Atheism itself is not verifiable using any empirical technique; Atheism is merely a disreputable parasite on the respectable pursuit of material knowledge, which is science.
Philosophical Materialism
Materialism as a philosophy claims that there exists no reality beyond material existence. The Philosophy of Materialism fails immediately, imploding in self-refutation. Philosophy itself is not material. How can an all-material reality require a non-material entity to describe it? So using a philosophical, non-material restriction to require an all-material reality is a self-contradiction, a paradox; it self-refutes. And never mind the “material mind” cover, claiming that ideas are material things. That one self-refutes also, choking on the issue of free will existing in a hardwired brain-mind. A hard-wired material brain-mind cannot freely produce non-material things such as philosophy, or even the abstraction of "free will".
Atheism and Hard Evidence
So we conclude that Atheism is not supported logically by either science or by materialism. What about hard, physical evidence? Well, even Atheists acknowledge that a negative existence cannot be proven. So in the total absence of supporting hard data favoring Atheism, the argument here falls back on Russell’s orbiting teapot, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, elves, faeries and other obvious constructs serve to prove that there is no deity. Is it enough to create these strawmen and then by demolishing them, to claim that to be a verification of “no first cause for the universe”? Of course not, but there are other straw men, such as the “who created god?” issue.
Who Created God
This issue invariably resurfaces ever since Russell was convinced by Mill’s argument. While it is a transparent dodge to avoid the issue of a sentient first cause, it merely diverts the argument into a disputative cul-de-sac. The “who created God” strawman purports to be unanswerable and therefore proof of “no first cause for the universe”… an obvious Red Herring diversion but worth destroying. So here we go:
Since space-time and mass-energy were created at t=0 (roughly) of the Big Bang, then time, for example, did not exist at t=0(-). However, the first cause did exist then, and in a sense not comprehensible to those of us trapped in space-time. Now if time as we know it did not exist before t=0, then neither did “cause and effect” as we know it, because the principle of cause and effect contains a necessary time relationship where the cause occurs first in time, then the effect occurs later in time.
So without “cause and effect” as we know it, it is meaningless to discuss what caused what in the prior existence to t=0(-). There is no need or even way to successfully posit a prior creation, in the empirical sense with which we are familiar.
The first cause existed at t=0(-). And for all we know, in perpetuity, in the sense of timelessness. The famous “who created…” dilemma does not even exist. It is a Red Herring.
The Pathway of Logic and Rational Thought
When I discovered the logical path to thinking these problems through, I rejected Atheism on a logical and rational basis. Moreover I recognized my own history of rebellion and attempts to attain elitism through rejection of authority. And I recognized the anti-rational behaviors of Atheists in general, including the advocacy of abortion (irrational on all levels) while denying involvement in eugenics, along with attacks of all kinds on the social fabric.
The logical inversion that accompanies rebellion is obvious in the thought processes of Atheists, each of whom subscribes to his own brand of logic and morality. Since no two Atheists believe the same things, there is no case to be made as to which Atheist is right. The departure from traditional logic is apparent.
While the same case can be made for religions in general, that is beside the point: the point is that Atheism is not rational, because it has no absolute first principles to guide its thinking. In fact, that greatest of Atheists, Friedrich Nietzsche, overtly rejected all first principles in his work, “Beyond Good and Evil”. First Principles are not provable empirically; so they are rejected, and by doing so rational thought is also rejected. Thus Nietzsche derived anti-rationalism, and although it might be denied by some modern Atheists, it cannot be removed from their worldviews, despite the rational camoflage used to hide it.
This is the reason that atheists are exceedingly difficult to engage in discussions using traditional logic; they do not use traditional logic: they invert it and rationalize their presuppositions. And because the rationalized presuppositions do not connect straight on with traditional logic, the conversation rapidly devolves into ad Hominem from a position of presumed superiority and elitism on the part of the Atheist. I choose not to go there.
Atheism is not only not rational, it is also anti-rational.
Footnotes
(1) The first principles of rational thought are the bedrock truths upon which logic and rational thought are based. These include the principle of cause and effect, the identity principle, the non-contradiction principle, and the excluded principle as well as others. These principles cannot be proven to be true empirically; they are known to be true by inspection and discernment. So both the principles and the method of recognizing the truth value of the principles are non-material, transcendental, abstract meta-realities. These must be rejected in order for Philosophical Materialism to be valid; or Philosophical Materialism must be rejected if these principles are accepted without material proof.
(2) Except for John Stuart Mill, whose education was driven by his Atheist father. Mill was intensely force fed classical education and utilitarianism until he had a mental break down in his late teens. He never rejected his overbearing father’s teaching of Atheism. This father was defective in a different sort of manner.
(3) http://voxday.blogspot.com/Vox Popoli, 2007.
Continue reading Hello...
6/14/08
Hitler’s Rabbi
Please note that this essay will now be housed in True Freethinker’s section on Adolf Hitler / Nazism / Communism
Continue reading Hitler’s Rabbi...
Continue reading Hitler’s Rabbi...
6/11/08
Howdy
I wanna thank the fellows from this fine site for the invite to share my thoughts with you and potentially make this a less respectable blog. I'll take this time to introduce myself a bit and let you know what you can expect out of me.
Firstly, I'm a regular ol' Protestant with pretty orthodox beliefs across the board. I've come out of a skeptical past (due to an upbringing in a charismatic church- and not the good kind) to have my faith rekindled in college. Apologetics has played an important part in my (re?) conversion so, unsurprisingly, I've taken to devoting a large chunk of my life to the study of my faith in an attempt to help my fellow believers understand theirs. Of course, I waste no opportunity to challenge the beliefs of non-Christians (particularly atheists) but I've grown to enjoy the challenges they offer back to me (hence my association with the blog).
Besides my faith and my wife, philosophy has stolen the biggest portion of my heart (and she can be downright ruthless!). I love to talk about the mind, free will and the arguments for/against God's existence, but feel free to talk to me about anything from aesthetics to mereology to Zeno. I'm a committed libertarian politically, but this year's election has my spirits down (so let's try and avoid that topic for a few more months).
Peaches,
Josh
Continue reading Howdy...
Firstly, I'm a regular ol' Protestant with pretty orthodox beliefs across the board. I've come out of a skeptical past (due to an upbringing in a charismatic church- and not the good kind) to have my faith rekindled in college. Apologetics has played an important part in my (re?) conversion so, unsurprisingly, I've taken to devoting a large chunk of my life to the study of my faith in an attempt to help my fellow believers understand theirs. Of course, I waste no opportunity to challenge the beliefs of non-Christians (particularly atheists) but I've grown to enjoy the challenges they offer back to me (hence my association with the blog).
Besides my faith and my wife, philosophy has stolen the biggest portion of my heart (and she can be downright ruthless!). I love to talk about the mind, free will and the arguments for/against God's existence, but feel free to talk to me about anything from aesthetics to mereology to Zeno. I'm a committed libertarian politically, but this year's election has my spirits down (so let's try and avoid that topic for a few more months).
Peaches,
Josh
Continue reading Howdy...
6/10/08
Pray for Brian Sapient
Just wanted to make a quick post to the readers regarding some news I just heard a few hours ago. It appears that one of the co-founders of the Rational Response Squad, Brian Sapient, was hospitalized a few days ago due to a violent attack by one of his fellow colleagues, Greydon Square at the recent AHA Conference. Apparently a verbal confrontation arose on account of the mishandling of CD sales and Greydon felt justified in assaulting his old friend eventually till Brian had to be carried off in an ambulance.
The news has been confirmed by some eyewitnesses and even Kelly indirectly confirmed it in one of her comments as you can see here
Though I have never agreed with the RRS and what I consider to be rather bigoted views by them I think it is only appropriate that we hope and pray for the good health and swift recovery of Brian at this time and that justice be brought upon the rather unstable and violent character of Greydon Square. For the Atheist out there as well, I only advise that if you haven't already, please take the time to consider what has happened and to understand that a human being has been hurt (rather severely) on what appears to be unjustified grounds. In this case, please hope for his recovery and please distance yourselves from anyone positively affiliated with this individual (and the person himself) Greydon Square.
Blessings.
-M-
Continue reading Pray for Brian Sapient...
The news has been confirmed by some eyewitnesses and even Kelly indirectly confirmed it in one of her comments as you can see here
Though I have never agreed with the RRS and what I consider to be rather bigoted views by them I think it is only appropriate that we hope and pray for the good health and swift recovery of Brian at this time and that justice be brought upon the rather unstable and violent character of Greydon Square. For the Atheist out there as well, I only advise that if you haven't already, please take the time to consider what has happened and to understand that a human being has been hurt (rather severely) on what appears to be unjustified grounds. In this case, please hope for his recovery and please distance yourselves from anyone positively affiliated with this individual (and the person himself) Greydon Square.
Blessings.
-M-
Continue reading Pray for Brian Sapient...
6/9/08
6/7/08
6/3/08
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Get my ebook, "The Apocryphal Jesus," here
In a nutshell, I have two major problems with atheism. Three, actually, but only two that atheists themselves are liable to even pretend to take seriously.
First, atheism is what I refer to as a “hopeless hypothesis”. That is, where the rubber meets the road, it’s wholly incompatible with actual life. Ideas like meaninglessness, purposelessness, determinism, and so forth are all well and good on paper. They are unlivable in practice. Human experience makes no sense without free will - true free will, not quantum uncertainty. “Making your own meaning” is as senseless as “making up the rules as you go” – either there are rules (or meaning), or not. The same atheists loudly deriding god-worshippers for being “delusional” are willfully, and often openly, self-delusional on these same topics. Even if atheism is true, we can’t actually live out that belief in any worthwhile way.
Secondly, atheism knocks down a lot of fences and walls, and opens a lot of doors. That sounds good at first, but some fences, walls, and locks are there for a reason. An atheist with whom I was conversing once said that atheism said as much about the morality of mass murder as it did about ordering pizza for delivery vs carry-out. He was trying to deny that atheism had any impact on historical atrocities, but he inadvertently made the same point that I’m making here. Once you accept that idea that there is no law higher than “our” law, that “good” and “evil” are just constructs, and that man is nothing but matter, walls fall down. You’re not prohibited from doing good – but the major boundaries around “evil” are gone, too.
Third, it’s simply not true.
My thanks, once again, for the chance to chip in. I have a few ideas already in the works for AiD, and I’m looking forward to the discussions that may follow.
-MedicineMan