Four Things
by Landon Haynes
There must be four gospels like there are four winds of heaven and four corners
of the Earth, wrote Irenaeus. This appears to have been the first Christian
figure to compile the four gospels we know today as official canon, and this is
the kind of criteria he used. Infighting, alterations, the dropping and adding
of books, book burning, mass violence, conquest, slavery, oppression, political
selection,editing, the borrowing and re-purposing of past religions continues
but the history of the Bible and Christianity is not what this piece is about.
Following Irenaeus, four claims made by theists have been on the wind, occupying
my own mental space as of late as I’ve gazed up at the heavens. I’ve set out to
thoroughly dissect them, conclusively. I submit my thoughts that they might be
as useful to others as they were therapeutic for me to record.
1. “Non-believers have no moral foundation.”
Theists have a horrible moral standard, but they accuse non-theists of having no
standards. But generally our standard is universal humanity: the facts of our
nature, that we’re an interdependent social species with empathy built into us
as we have to live together. We can recognize the point in it–that if one
group’s rights are curtailed ours could be next, etc. We realize we need
accurate facts to build our morality on so we indeed appeal to science,
understanding there may be facts we presently lack. We try to learn from
history. Witness the difference between treating the physically or mentally ill
as if they were cursed or possessed by demons (views the Bible espouses) and
recognizing them as victims of microorganisms and chemical imbalances, where
sick children are taken to the doctor and not the exorcist.
The theist MO is to be a minion. It’s might makes right. But how is obedience to
authority morality? How is this wise? We follow laws in society because we
recognize their benefits and we try to change them or have revolutions if
they’re fallacious or unbeneficial. We don’t blindly and unthinkingly follow
laws just because the government said so and is the foundation of morality, it
exists because we support and allow it to collectively. If authority is morality
any authority could be the foundation of morality, where will that lead (see
North Korea)? Shouldn’t morality best be bottom up and decided on and discovered
and recognized based on our human nature and because it works and makes sense,
just like our laws?
Theists special plead and state their god is special, but this is the laughable
thing they always do. Once you go from saying there is some thing out there we
could call a god to giving specifics about it–it’s eternal, the most perfect or
just being–you are just making bald-faced assertions that you have no idea
about and you’re exponentially decreasing the probability that anything you’re
saying is true or the being you’re describing is real. One could ask just where
your god got its morals just like you can ask just where did it come from. If it
has good reasons for its moral orders we can appeal to those reasons without the
middleman. Further, “god’s” morals in scripture, and its apparent morals in
nature are abhorrent and few would emulate or wish to advocate them minus
ridiculous excuses. Further, he has no claim to moral authority or
accountability when murderers can come to Jesus and go to heaven while billions
go to an eternal torture chamber he’s made for not believing something-the most
sadistic and unjust idea ever created. In fact, one would be in prison or an
insane asylum if one followed the Bible literally.
And what of the fact of all the gods and religions out there? Just all the sects
of one religion who agree on little and endlessly slaughtered each other before
the coming of secular governments based on the universal humanity and reason and
fairness that non-theists advocate? Religion’s track record for all of history
is almost comically bloody. How is this objective, it’s obviously not wise or
unifying. If you base your morality on religion, what happens when you lose that
religion? On the other hand, you’ll never stop being a social animal amongst
social animals who generally feels bad at treating another poorly and risks
getting treated poorly if you do. Appealing to invisible authorities that can’t
be justified to non-adherents is a great way to dismiss your fellow humans, and
to lose your own humanity, as again history and current headlines all too often
attest.
Secular morality is superior to religious morality.
2. “Man is corrupt and his efforts to ‘play God’ will destroy him.”
“Increasingly, modern science pursues powers traditionally reserved for the
almighty. But those who encroach upon the province of the gods realize too late
that the price for entrance is destruction.”
So goes the closing narration of the opening episode of the modern 1990s “The
Outer Limits” TV show, reminiscent of theist arguments one hears stating that we
must “trust in God, not in man” and “science is more dangerous and culpable than
religion”. So, lightning rods, curing diseases, connecting the world, feeding
the multitudes, diminishing poverty and ignorance, doubling life expectancy,
scaling the heavens and the stars, understanding the world so that we have
leverage on it is destruction? The destruction was already there, that’s what
compelled us to overcome it. A meteor could have always wiped out life just like
a nuke could. But in the latter scenario we have an opportunity for reason and
survival (and an opportunity to survive any future meteors). Risk is involved
(we’re not gods and there are no gods to protect us), but no more than the risk
that the “gods” already placed upon us. Just what would the writer of this
narration and his theist counterparts have us as a species do?
The replacing of revelation with investigation has been the single greatest and
most transformative boon to the human race. Scientific values of objectivity,
rationality, open testability, cooperation, and skepticism are bulwarks against
darker impulses of bias, prejudice, superstition, and hysteria. It’s taken us
from cave dwellers to space explorers and creates an overall story that makes
belief in human potential the “justified faith” I wrote a whole book about.
Every bit of the mind-boggling progress we have seen, including us now being in
the best time to be alive in history by virtually every measure, is due to human
thought, empathy, cooperation, and action at their most sublime. Meanwhile,
imagine if in all these many thousands of years in which the faithful have cried
out to their gods in vain and religion had total control and manipulated and
profited from this situation, though never able to prove any of its claims, or
uncover any knowledge, or truly better people’s lives, imagine if it had modern
weaponry in its crusades of righteous tyranny…
3. “Christianity is rational.”
“God” sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself and create a
loophole for his own rules, no better way could be thought of, because an
uncomprehending rib woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat fruit and
pursue knowledge (putting these things in place and knowing what would happen),
then cursing all innocent descendants for it? Very rational. A human or blood
sacrifice that wasn’t really a sacrifice somehow “saves” mankind, and most are
still going to hell anyway? Magnificently rational. Sickness is caused by demons
requiring exorcism, you don’t need to wash your hand before eating, mud and spit
cure blindness, faith makes you immune to poison? Quite rational. Having your
story be so similar to dozens of gods and myths that came before you? So
rational. Salvation depends on belief, which is involuntary (something a god
would know) and bad,vague, contradicting, or no evidence? Quite logical. Having
your book be filled with barbarism and contradictions? Necessarily logical.
Allowing endless religions and sects? Ingenious. Allowing your religion to have
a comically horrific history, spread by bloodshed, force, and accident, in which
no one can still agree on much of anything? Wise. A man-god predicts his own
return within the lives of his listeners, 2,000 years ago now? Sensibly
compelling. Three is one and one is three? Deeply comprehensible.
An infinitely loving god allows and causes random atrocity and calamity,
regardless of the victims’ beliefs or virtue, the scale and depths of which
would make most human beings’ stomachs turn? Intellectually unassailable. A
being is omni-everything that created all in perfect knowledge and power yet
makes mistakes, has regrets, and blames things on everyone else? Mentally
immaculate. Believing still that the ultimate answers MUST be magical and
supernatural despite this NEVER being the answer up until now? Brilliant.
Eschewing all the evidence of bottom-up evolution and obstinately demanding
complexity requires a designer who would be infinitely more complex? Supremely
reasonable. Holding or commanding faith (as if this is a reliable path to truth)
above reason, revelation above investigation-exactly the opposite of the means
by which all our progress has been made? Irreproachably sagacious.
Seriously?
4. “There must have been a creator.”
Doesn’t it make more sense that a universe came first, not a mind, not some
super person? In what space does god exist then, and has he just been there,
alone and bored forever or does he have company? If complex things need a
creator, who or what created god? If god needs no creator and always existed
(put aside that this is unsupported special pleading), why can’t the universe be
the thing that’s always existed? It’s much simpler than a god and we know it
does exist. Doesn’t science show, anyway, that things are evolutionary and
bottom up? Wouldn’t something as complex as a god need to have evolved (if
you’re not going to again employ special pleading)?
Isn’t god just magically poofing things into existence, or himself poofing into
existence, just as magical as virtual particles poofing into existence? Except,
we know virtual particles exist and do this because we detect them (and wasn’t
our visible universe once at this quantum size of scale?). And again they’re
simpler than a god. God is used to explain complexity but does it really,
doesn’t it just add more complexity and explain nothing, or at least sets the
need for an explanation back a step? And what is “God”? It looks to me like an
anthropomorphic projection born of cosmically microscopic human fear and
ignorance but isn’t it possible there are things one could call “god” that
aren’t conscious minds, or that are but are just advanced life?
Don’t physicists say the universe, at its most fundamental level, is just
quantum fields with no trace of purpose or goals? How purposeful or blissful is
it to shun the only world we know we have for one of many unsupported
hypothetical ones where you spend eternity on bended knee, endlessly praising a
master who also is responsible for the endless torture of billions of good
people and loved ones?
