In Response to Thoughtlessness (or—The Atheist Mind)

The following is an excerpt taken from the transcripts of a lecture given by the famous philosopher, Mr. Billy Brightish, at the equally famous policy institute, WHATTHINKUM U, in the great Southwestern village of Albuquirky. The extract actually comes from the question/answer portion at the end of the talk (but before the widely reported police intervention) when one particular young man (and aren't they always young) came to the mic to challenge Mr. Brightish. The lecture presented an analytical breakdown of the spurious inferences and irrational suppositions of the atheist mind presented in its varied art forms today with a particular emphasis on television and film.

"You in the pink muscle-shirt and sandals. What is your question?"

Q: Sir, I'd like to know what gives you the right to criticize writing in film, television, or anywhere else? It's interesting to me when people who don't work in a particular field criticize the craftsmanship of an artist.

A: Hmm...(pause). I fail to see anything at all interesting in it. I don't make cars, but, like most people, I can easily tell you everything that's wrong with mine. I'm not a barber, but, I know perfectly well when my hair is cut right or when it's uneven; when it's been left too long or cut too short. You don't seem to know this, but I actually am an author. It wouldn't matter, however, if I was not. I would still be a conversationalist. I have thoughts and theories. I'm a philosopher. I'm a metaphysician. I'm a logician. I'm a dreamer. I am every man. And like most men, I know poor dialog when I hear it or see it. I know poor logic, poor sentence structure, whining, cliché's, theoretical impracticalities, a priori arguments, baseless conjecturing, opinions established on mere sentiment along with the vulgar sophistry that is so much a part of the atheistic mindset in the world of art.

Picasso used a fair amount of symbolism in his work. Unfortunately, his paintings and sculptures seldom said anything when reconstructed. Even a poor logician like Freud would agree that sometimes a nude is just a nude and a beggar just a beggar. Unless a work of art tells a story, it fails as art, but may please as mere esthetic. I find over and over that atheist artists either fail to say anything useful, or they say something worse than useless, and that is an untruth.

Let us consider the recent web series The Confession. You may think important questions are asked in the show. I say that the queries are childlike and the responses inconsiderate. Our doltish gunman played by Kiefer Sutherland posed a surmisal a few episodes back that came wrapped in the kind of irreality this series will be known for (if it's to be known for anything at all) when he suggested, no—declared—that there were more murders done in the name of religion that anything else. Even during the crusades Christians only killed 100,000—a drop in the bucket compared to atheists. Atheists have killed more people during the past hundred years than all the religions of the world combined during the past two thousand. Mao killed 70 million; Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev killed 66.7 million; Brezhnev 900,000; Mussolini 300,000; Pol Pot 1,700,000 for starters.

Q: People do not kill in the name of atheism. If an atheist communist kills a large number of people, he did not kill them because he was an atheist but because of ideologies.

A: What's in a name? How about if I say they kill in the spirit of atheism? What all those mass murderers had in common was atheism and Social Darwinism. Genocide is the logical outcome of Social Darwinism carried out to its conclusion. I've yet to see a genocidal Social Darwinist who was not an atheist. Some might argue that Hitler was one, but I would counter with the fact that he would claim to be a Pagan to one group of people and a Christian to another group down the road. It seems fairly obvious to me that he didn't really believe in anything but his own selfish desires.

Q: But atheism is not a belief. It doesn't tell you what is right or wrong, it doesn't have a moral conduct, and it doesn't tell you how to live your life. It is ONLY a rejection of a specific belief.

A: I disagree. It is no mere a negation. The only people it isn't a belief for are those who have never heard of it, nor of concepts of God. That might entail a few tribesmen in a remote village who have had no contact with the rest of the world. A person like that can be an atheist without knowing it. It's doubtful, however, that this would include anyone anywhere since every single known language in the history of the world has a word for God. At any rate, for anyone who has heard of a God concept, atheism is of course a choice, and you cannot make a choice without forming an opinion, which in this case is what you mean when you say belief.

Further, atheism is the worship of self. Its code of conduct is selfishness. And this is why every single known genocidal Social Darwinist has been an atheist. Both ideologies are completely egocentric.

You also cannot be an atheist without being an adherent of naturalism, empiricism, and humanism among other cockamamie beliefs. Atheism is an entire belief system. Naturalism, incidentally, makes no room for free will. And of course, since free will is obvious to all mankind, atheism is foolishness. Or do you really think that the reason people all over the world stop at a red light is because the random particles of the universe just happened to make them all do this?

Q: "It is an absolute failure of logic at best to suggest atheism kills people."

A: Atheism is a worship of self interest at the expense of all others. It's a philosophy that says, "Do what thou wilt." It's a philosophy that says, "Nothing matters." It's a philosophy that says, "There are no consequences for my actions." Atheism is nothing short of a recipe for murder and insanity.

Q: "I suggest you have an irrational hatred of atheism."

A: This is the way a child argues. He lies. He calls dislike—hate. He calls the rational—irrational. And it's exactly what I expect from an atheist. Atheism is the most childish and thoughtless of all metaphysical suggestions. It abhors science, and it abhors reason. Therefore it must lie to make even an artificial point.

Q: "Claiming atheists kill more people than anyone else is equivilant to...."

A: I gave a verifiable list of genocidal events carried out by atheists that amounted to well over a 100-million murders in the last hundred years alone. If there is a similar verifiable list of anywhere near that amount in a hundred year period pertaining to a religious person or group, I've never come across it, and you haven't offered one. Is there any chance you'll say something truthful at some point?

Q: "Social Darwinism is directly contrary to evolution"

A: Hogwash. Evolution is about natural selection in conjunction with survival of the fittest, part of which is the fighting to the death of organisms and animals. A Cuckoo Bird pushes eggs from other birds such as Warblers, out of their nests, and places her own eggs in it. After the chick hatches, it will push any remaining eggs and/or hatched Warbler chicks out of the nest and then spend its remaining days, before fledgling, imitating the call of Warbler chicks so that the Warbler parent will feed it. This kind of killing is a part of Darwinism. This is exactly what Social Darwinists do.

Q: How'd you like me to kill....

End of extract.

Why The Bible Is Different

About fifteen years ago I began to read a lot of writings from the Mesopotamia. I also read a lot of American Indian myths and quite a bit of Hindu writings. After a year or so of this little journey, one thing became abundantly clear. There is nothing like the bible despite its faults.

The first thing I ever read by Plato was The Republic. Two things struck me about it. The first was that Plato actually chastised the writings of Homer and others who had presented the Greek gods as being corrupt. He actually suggested changing them! (The stories—not the gods). The second was that Plato believed in the gods, but didn't seem to believe much at all that had been written about them. You'll find this is true of most Greeks from his time and the later Romans as well. Almost none of them believed their mythology to be non-fiction, let alone journalism. They knew the stories were made-up. They had festivals and celebrations based around these stories at times because they enjoyed the parties. The wine ran like a river at them. No wonder they had such respect for so detestable a character as Bacchus! Their mythology was nothing but fun and games for them. It was like reading comic books. They just weren't taken seriously.

We might say something similar concerning Plato's writings about Socrates. I doubt that anyone believed these stories about Socrates were anything other than Plato's own tales being put into the mouth of his hero and teacher. It might be true that Socrates said many of the things Plato wrote, but obviously Plato invented the bulk of the dialog that went with it. Of course no one could put down from memory long conversations that took place between people years earlier, so Plato had to invent most of the conversations and probably many of the settings and characters as well. Nobody minded this because this was the way stories were passed down in those days. They got the gist of things right more often than not, and that was all that was important. Virtually 90% of everything you'll ever read from ancient authors that involved real people was heavily embellished and fictionalized. In fact, if other of Socrates' peers hadn't also written about him, most of us today would probably think he never really existed at all and was just a character Plato invented from scratch.

CS Lewis said that part of what convinced him of the truth of Jesus was that the stories about him in the four biblical gospels read more like a person's diary, and at times even outright journalism. The writers seemed to just be reporting the facts of what they saw and heard. That doesn't mean there wasn't any sort of embellishing of those stories. They weren't written until decades after the Resurrection. I doubt very much if any of the early churchmen took the stories and all those long conversations, such as the sermon on the mount, as being told verbatim. Like Plato, the gospel writers probably had to invent some of the dialog. They obviously couldn't remember long conversations from decades gone by, and since no one's memory is perfect, this accounts for their versions of certain events all being at least slightly different. It's probably also true that later writers like Mathew and Luke took the earlier gospel of Mark/Peter for reference in their own writings. John's gospel is of course very different from the others. And it may be that some things in those gospels were simply made-up. This is especially true of Mathew's gospel. We don't know for sure. Did the virgin birth really happen? I've personally always doubted it. I think it's quite possible that Mathew and Luke both invented this to keep up with the Romans around them who had many heroes that were said to have been born of a union between a god and a mortal. Could it be that these writers were only human and caved in to peer pressure? After all, aside from Mathew and Luke, no other NT book makes mention of the virgin birth at all. My question is, does it matter? Can't we be happy and live the lives God wants us to live whether the virgin birth story is true or not? What possible effect could that have on my life? None that I can think of. But embellishments aside, the gospel stories mostly do not read like fiction. They mostly read like true stories about real people. You simply don't get the impression of "fiction" when you read them.

One of the more important discoveries that came from my reading ancient texts was how honest the Jewish writers seemed by comparison. I recall a guy named Peter that I mentioned this to one day, and I really think it was the biggest part of what made him re-evaluate his life and get back into the Christianity he had known as a boy. Pete was very interested in all things Egyptian. He had even been to Egypt a few times. He, like a lot of people, was convinced that the Egyptians were an advanced race just like those fables of Atlantis. I mentioned to him that the biblical writings seemed the most truthful of all ancient manuscripts to me because the bible actually told you all the bad things the Jews ever did right from the beginning. Adam and Eve messed up. Solomon built temples in the "high places". Cain killed Able. David and Bathsheba. Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. On and on. Kings and Chronicles will tell you not only the great achievements of Israel's kings, but they'll also tell you every little thing they did wrong. I've yet to come across any other ancient writings anywhere in the world that did that. I told Pete to go and read all the Egyptian priestly writings and then come back and tell me all the bad things the Egyptians did. He thought about that for a very long while and realized he obviously wouldn't come back with very much. There's simply nothing about them that seems realistic. And it's the same with their gods. Who on earth would read the stories about Horus, Osiris, or Isis and believe them to be anything but fiction? If you read those writings along with those from the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Akkadians and others, they read as though they had never lost a war and how all the peoples of the Earth were subject to them. We know they're dishonest because their neighbors wrote entirely different accounts about them (and the writings of all their neighbors matched). Where do other ancient texts tell you all the bad things they and their forefathers did? I've yet to come across such a book.

The Jewish writings were simply like nothing else on earth. That doesn't mean they're completely accurate or that God inspired them all. But where we find truth, we find at least a glimpse of the Divine, and you simply won't find that kind of honestly where people are actually self deprecating in any other ancient work. Homer and Virgil probably came closest, but it was seldom the actions of their own people they condemned. It was the actions of their gods!

At any rate, this has been one of the more effective arguments I've used for years when talking about Christianity to people. The self deprecating honesty of the Jews sets their writings apart from all other ancient peoples. I don't think anyone said it before me fifteen years ago, though someone certainly may have. But you're welcome to take this argument and make it your own just as several people already have.

Three Rabbis

This is an excerpt from Orson Scott Card's novel, Speaker for the Dead. It's a quote from an imaginary character in the story named San Angelo who started a Catholic Order centuries earlier. I thought it was good.

A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.)

The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. "Is there any man here," he says to them, "who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?"

They murmur and say, "We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it."

The Rabbi says, "Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong." He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, "Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant."

So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, "Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone."

The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. "Someday," they think, "I may be like this woman. And I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated."

As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones.

"Nor am I without sins," he says to the people, "but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it."

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So of course, we killed him.

-San Angelo
Letters to an Incipient Heretic

The Big Blue Castle

Stephen Hawking made some big waves last month upon the release of his latest book: The Grand Design. You've probably heard about it already, but indulge me. For the record, I haven't read the book yet and have only browsed the internet for quotes from it.

In The Grand Design Professor Hawking syllogizes (his hypothesis is based on both M-Theory and the Big Bang Theory) an argument for a self-creating universe. You may have heard lately that Hawking has stated that the universe was not made by God. Well he hasn't actually said this. He does, however, come very close to it. This seems to stem from an article in last month's Wall Street Journal where they printed an excerpt from the book. The excerpt was titled: "Why God Did Not Create the Universe (There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world—no gods required)." Then below this it says: "By STEPHEN HAWKING And LEONARD MLODINOW." This makes it appear as though Hawking and his physicist writing partner had written the excerpt and the title of it. Obviously a guy like Hawking does not send in articles to publications like the WSJ. Of course the excerpt title was given by a staff member there.

But Hawking does say something very disturbing: "As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist."

That sure sounds like an atheist talking to me. This genius professor has never professed a belief in any kind of God, but in his past books he always seemed open to the possibility of a mind in the mix of things. What happened? Hawking is now 68 years old. With Lou Gehrig Disease, it's amazing he's lived this long. He's made some amazing discoveries throughout his career. It seems to me, however, that he's losing his perspective on what science is actually capable of achieving.

For instance, he says, "According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing."

Really? Out of nothing? Undoubtedly he's knowledgeable about primordial matter—that small bit of stuff which has always existed and from which our universe sprang. The only thing that comes from nothing is nothing. Something had to have always been here. According to Big Bang Theory, in the beginning the universe was a very tiny place indeed. There was not in it the four forces of energy we know so well today, but instead one super-force. Was there matter? We have to remember that all energy has matter, and all matter has energy. It's very much like the way a particle can also be a wave. Therefore we have to think of this super-energy as being matter also, but not yet in a material state so to speak. The super-energy would remain in an energy state for a an unknown period of time before it changed into matter, so we should probably think of it more as potential matter. At the very least we can say that the energy has always been here. Energy is not "nothing." But I am certainly not telling you anything Mr. Hawking does not know himself and know better than I, so why he states that universes were created out of nothing is curious. He even mentions primordial elements (what that energy turned into) at one point in the book and goes on to list many of the things that had to have taken place to the nth degree for a place like Earth to exist where life can thrive.

The tale of how the primordial universe of hydrogen, helium and a bit of lithium evolved to a universe harboring at least one world with intelligent life like us is a tale of many chapters. The forces of nature had to be such that heavier elements—especially carbon—could be produced from the primordial elements, and remain stable for at least billions of years. Those heavy elements were formed in the furnaces we call stars, so the forces first had to allow stars and galaxies to form. Those in turn grew from the seeds of tiny inhomogeneities in the early universe.

Even all that is not enough: The dynamics of the stars had to be such that some would eventually explode, precisely in a way that could disperse the heavier elements through space. In addition, the laws of nature had to dictate that those remnants could recondense into a new generation of stars, these surrounded by planets incorporating the newly formed heavy elements.

By examining the model universes we generate when the theories of physics are altered in certain ways, one can study the effect of changes to physical law in a methodical manner. Such calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5% in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4% in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Also, most of the fundamental constants appearing in our theories appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different, and in many cases unsuitable for the development of life. For example, if protons were 0.2% heavier, they would decay into neutrons, destabilizing atoms.

If one assumes that a few hundred million years in stable orbit is necessary for planetary life to evolve, the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible. In any but three dimensions even a small disturbance, such as that produced by the pull of the other planets, would send a planet off its circular orbit, and cause it to spiral either into or away from the sun.

The emergence of the complex structures capable of supporting intelligent observers seems to be very fragile. The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned. What can we make of these coincidences? Luck in the precise form and nature of fundamental physical law is a different kind of luck from the luck we find in environmental factors. It raises the natural question of why it is that way.

Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God.

In reality he hasn't even begun to list all the things that had to happen for us to be here. That life exists anywhere is a miracle beyond any proportion the mind can conceive. There are billions of biological evolutionary steps that had to happen and happen in just the right way at just the right time, all while the cosmological setting of our planet maintained a near perfect orbit for billions of years in just the right conditions. Professor Andrew Watson from the University of East Anglia, a mathematician, says:

If we learned the planet would be habitable for a set period and that we had evolved early in this period, then even with a sample of one, we’d suspect that evolution from simple to complex and intelligent life was quite likely to occur. By contrast, we now believe that we evolved late in the habitable period, and this suggests that our evolution is rather unlikely. In fact, the timing of events is consistent with it being very rare indeed. ... Complex life is separated from the simplest life forms by several very unlikely steps and therefore will be much less common. Intelligence is one step further, so it is much less common still....

He goes on to say that the probability of each step occurring at all is less than 10% and that the probability of intelligent life occurring is less than .01% over 4-billion years. Also, each step must happen in a precise order, and this is even less likely.

Professor Hawking invokes the atheist magic dust of infinity to account for all this. M-theory predicts nearly an infinite number of universes to have coincided with the Big Bang. He believes that with an infinite number of universes anything and everything will eventually happen—possibly more than once. Some people actually believe that infinity could eventually produce an exact duplicate of Earth somewhere in some world—perhaps many copies with doppelgangers of each one of us.

Now I ask you, if you were to roll one die, what are the chances of that die coming up on a number you predict? One in six of course. And the chances of two dice coming up on the same number is much greater than that. If you had a trillion dice, what do you think the chances are of every one of them coming up on the same number? It will likely never happen did you say? Every time you add more dice your odds get worse—not better. The number of particles that had to be aligned just so in such a way to get an Earth and intelligent life on it is immeasurable. It might as well be an infinite number. To think this would ever happen again is the stuff of such madness that only a conspiracy theorist of the highest order would entertain such a notion. I've heard similar imaginative ramblings from professors who claimed that if you tossed a box of sand in the air enough times, the grains would eventually land on the floor in a perfect outline of the Mona Lisa along with every other piece of art ever created. The fact is that this has been attempted several times with computer generated random graphics, and not once has it ever exactly duplicated any recognizable artwork.

Here's something else to consider. I mentioned before a trillion dice all coming up on the same number as probably being impossible even given an infinite length of time. Let's say they all had to come up with the number-3. That atheist magic dust of infinity also works the other way. If you want to say that anything is possible given an infinite amount of time, then it's just as possible that a trillion dice could all land on the number-4 every time you threw them till the end of time... (Wonderful how a tiny ellipsis can represent something as large as infinity isn't it)?

I'll tell you how I view this world of ours. Suppose you had a bush pilot fly you to a remote part of Alaska that wasn't on any map. Someplace where there exist mountains, valleys, and lakes that no man has ever seen or set foot on. And after hiking through this barren landscape for several weeks you climb to the top of a mountain and find there a large blue castle luxuriously furnished with all the requisites for life—a refrigerator full of food, running water, a bed and chair that seemed tailor-made for you, a furnace to keep you warm, a thermostat set at the exact temperature your body desires, electric lights along with a hydro powered generator outside perfectly placed by a waterfall to keep them on, and every other modern convenience you could ever desire. If it's a matter of odds, which would seem more likely to you: that this big blue castle and everything in it "just happened" to be produced by mere chance? or that someone created it?