1.28.2008

What Is Christian Extremism?

crusader

The tagline for Atheist Revolution is "Breaking free from irrational belief and opposing Christian extremism." Most people are familiar with the concept of "religious extremism," but what exactly is Christian extremism?

I trust that you are used to hearing terms such as "religious extremism," "Islamofascist," "Islamic extremist," and the like. If you have been exposed to any of the U.S. news media's coverage of the Bush administration's unjust war in Iraq, you have encountered these phrases countless times. They provide us with a useful starting point in defining Christian extremism.

Christian Fundamentalism

In the interest of both brevity and improved understanding, I will place the following discussion in a Christian context, exploring the meanings of Christian fundamentalism, Christian extremism, and Christian terrorism. What do we mean by Christian fundamentalism, and what criteria identify a Christian fundamentalist? Drawing on multiple scholarly sources, we can utilize the following criteria:

  • Biblical Inerrancy/Literalism (at least with regard to creation)
  • Evangelism
  • Premillenialism (expectation of second coming, rapture, etc.)
  • Separatism/Sense of Persecution

So, a Christian fundamentalist is someone who fits this description.

1.23.2008

No Ghosts, No Gods

ghosts

I wanted to try something different in the post, so I have constructed some dialogue between three people discussing the existence of ghosts. What follows is based on actual conversations I have had; however, I have taken some license by collapsing multiple conversations along these lines into a single one to make it easier to read.
A: What about you? How many ghosts have you seen?
B: I've seen four ghosts in my lifetime, each at a different time and in a different place.
Z: None of us have ever seen a ghost because ghosts don't exist.

A: How do you know what we've seen? Were you there?
Z: I don't claim to know what you saw. I have no idea what you saw, but I know it wasn't a ghost because ghosts don't exist.

A: How do you know they don't exist? You said you've never seen one. We have, and we know what we saw?
Z: I can be fairly confident that they do not exist because there has never been a single instance where evidence of a so-called ghost has been confirmed to the degree necessary for such an unusual phenomenon, and...
A: But you can't prove they don't exist!
Z: Let me finish. I am saying that ghosts do not exist because there has never been a single case where sufficient evidence was presented to support the extraordinary claim that ghosts are real. No conclusive video evidence, no instances of multiple observations made by reliable sources of the same sighting at the same time, etc. What I am saying is that we need impressive evidence to verify such a claim, and we have none. I certainly believe that many people think they have seen ghosts, but there is insufficient evidence to conclude that ghosts probably exist.

B: But like he said, you can't prove that ghosts don't exist.
Z: I think you are misunderstanding the meaning of "proof" in this context. You could argue that I can't prove that monsters don't live under your bed, but we both know they don't. To verify a knowledge claim, we examine the evidence supporting such a claim. We expect to find evidence in proportion to the likelihood of the claim being true, so we might not require much evidence for a rather ordinary or trivial claim. But for something like a colony of monsters living under your bed, we would require considerable evidence.

A: But this is different. I have evidence that ghosts exists because I saw one.
Z: Again, I believe that you think you saw a ghost. You might have even seen something that was not purely a product of your own mind. However, this is not the sort of evidence we need to verify the claim that ghosts exist.

1.16.2008

Accused Murderer Says God Made Him Kill

I took photo with Canon camera in Tyl...
I took photo with Canon camera in Tyler, TX. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Whenever someone commits a horrible crime and then claims that some god told them to do it, believers and non-believers unite to reject the claim. Non-believers have an easy time rejecting the "god make me do it" defense because we reason that mythical beings cannot influence human behavior. We might accept the possibility that the criminal's belief contributed to the action, or we might look for mental illness.

The believer often has a different path to the same conclusion. For the believer, god did not command them to engage in the despicable act because god would never do such a terrible thing. Of course, one only has to read the Christian bible or listen to Pat Robertson to realize that this is simply not true.

The community of Tyler, TX, is reeling in the aftermath of a gruesome murder that would make Jeffrey Dahmer proud. 25 year-old Christopher Lee McCuin has been arraigned for allegedly killing and mutilating his 21-year-old girlfriend, Jana Shearer.

Shearer's boyfriend, Christopher Lee McCuin, 25, was charged with capital murder after police said they found her body, an ear boiling in a pot on a stovetop, and a hunk of flesh with a fork in it on a plate at the crime scene.
What makes this case relevant here is that police indicate that McCuin told them that his god, presumably the Christian god, made him kill Shearer.

As an atheist, I can dismiss this claim on the grounds that I do not accept the reality of the Christian god. I can accept the possibility that McCuin may have actually believed what he allegedly told investigators. Of course, I can also accept the possibilities that he lied to avoid responsibility or that he is suffering from serious mental illness.

The most common response from believers in cases like this is that the claim must be false because their god would never do such a thing. Christians who use this argument have evidently never read their own bibles. If they did, they would discover that their god supposedly commanded believers to commit all sorts of atrocities. In addition, I find it fascinating that many of the same Christians who would make this claim have little trouble believing Pat Robertson's claims that their god sends natural disasters to punish us for being tolerant of homosexuals, allowing abortion, or expecting that our schools will teach science rather than creationist bullshit, etc.

If Christians want to dismiss the possibility that their god may have actually commanded McCuin to do what he did, they are going to need to come up with some other rationale for doing so.

1.11.2008

Tired of the Evangelical Christians Proselytizing at Your Door? Try This

French - Door with Cat Hole - Walters 64164

Almost nobody likes door-to-door proselytizing. I view it as an invasion of my privacy, as a disruption of the limited free time I enjoy. It is condescending, annoying, and unnecessary. I think we could find a church if we wanted to do so.

A Brief Message for the Evangelical Christians Among You

You just returned from church. You are looking forward to spending a quiet Sunday afternoon with your family before you return to church that evening. It is revival season, after all. Your doorbell rings. You open the door to reveal a well-dressed young man with a small child in tow. "Good afternoon! I was hoping I could take a few minutes of your time to tell you about the church of Satan." In stunned silence, you realize your mouth is hanging open. Your 6-year-old daughter is now standing beside you at the door. He continues, "You see, we believe that Christianity is a perversion of basic human truths and..." You manage to shut the door.

If you are a "bible-believing Christian," I am guessing you would be upset if this scenario happened on your front porch. Please try to understand that I feel every bit as upset when this happens on my porch. But in my case, the intruder is usually an evangelical Christian. I'm confident that I'm not alone in feeling this way. Here are some thoughts that often flash through my head when I am interrupted by an evangelical Christian peddling superstition at my door:

  • "What makes you think you have the right to disturb me with this nonsense?"
  • "How dare you invade my privacy with this crap!"
  • "How would you like it if I came to your home and tried to sell you on my beliefs?"
  • "Does this sort of idiocy actually work on anybody?"

1.10.2008

Atheism Does NOT Require Faith

faith

Next to the claim that atheists are evil because some sort of god is required for morality, insisting that atheism requires faith seems to be a favorite among many Christians. In this post, I will provide a recent example of this claim and then attempt to explain why it is false.

Joey Depew, a member of the Board of Contributors to the Chillicothe Gazette (OH), writes:
The thing I find most interesting about atheism is the amount of faith it requires to believe. Christians have the Creation story and atheists have the Big Bang. So you have God, or some higher being, creating the world and some beginning of life, or you have nothing. If I remember correctly, the Big Bang began with some molecule of matter being struck by some molecule of anti-matter and then - BANG! - the universe expanded beyond measure in a fraction of time.

If that doesn't take faith to believe then I don't know what does. Where did that initial matter come from? If there was nothing but a huge void, how could matter just suddenly appear, let alone something as complicated as anti-matter? By some mathematically impossible chance? Incidentally, the Big Bang and everything that supposedly followed is mathematically impossible.

If memory serves, mathematical impossibility is defined by something having a 1 in 10 to the 50th power chance of happening. That's a 1 followed by 50 zeros. Roger Penrose, a British mathematician, calculated that the odds of our universe happening by chance are 1 in 1000 to the 123rd power.

Now tell me atheism doesn't require faith.
Mr. Depew, your attempt to explain the Big Bang theory reflects a considerable lack of understanding of modern science. Saying that atheism requires faith because you do not understand science is a non sequitur. But we can keep this simple without getting into astrophysics for now.

Take out a sheet of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle, dividing it into two columns. At the top of the left side, write "Evidence for the creation story," and on the top of the right side, write "Evidence for natural origins." Anyone who has earned a high school diploma should be able to fill the right column with brief summaries of evidence supporting natural origins of the what exists today. Those with college-level science education will need more paper. And the left side? It remains blank.

To believe the creation story requires faith because there is insufficient evidence to support the belief. Most Christians readily acknowledge this and do not see it as a problem. If ample evidence existed, faith would not be necessary. In fact, it would be entirely irrelevant. The mountains of evidence supporting the naturalistic worldview are undeniable, even by most Christians. One needs no faith the accept gravity, evolution, or many other basic scientific concepts. No faith is needed to accept naturalism; considerable faith is required to argue for any alternative.

Now consider atheism itself. An atheist is one who does not accept the theistic belief claim (i.e., a god or gods exist). The theist accepts this claim on faith; the atheist in unwilling to do so. The atheist need not argue that no gods do (or could) exist; the atheistic position is simply that the theist has not met an acceptable burden of proof that is his or hers to meet. In other words, an atheist is an atheist precisely because he or she is not willing to accept the theist's claim on faith.

Now that we've set that aside, it is time to look at one other point you make, Mr. Depew, because I suspect this is the real motive for your article.
The mistake atheists make is they assume religious people are intellectually flawed by virtue of the fact they are religious. Let's take one aspect of a person or group of person's and use it to define them inferiorly as a whole. Sounds a lot like believing people are less because they are black or female or handicapped, doesn't it? This fundamentally sets atheism against most of society, a society that, by in large, believes in God.

This is where atheists fail themselves. It can be seen in their narcissistic temper tantrums - 'You crazy Christian! How can you believe in an invisible man living in an invisible kingdom in the sky when I, the intellectually superior and enlightened atheist, am telling you that you are wrong?'

Talk about audacity. I can't think of any other group that tries to sway people by demeaning them. But again, it is this inherent sense of superiority that pervades the "enlightened" atheistic persona.
Intellectually flawed? No. Irrational? Absolutely. By definition, faith (i.e., continuing to believe something for which insufficient evidence exists) is irrational. But this does not mean that theists are somehow less intelligent or less deserving of happiness than atheists.

In fact, what you describe (i.e., "Let's take one aspect of a person or group of person's and use it to define them inferiorly [sic] as a whole") sounds an awful lot like what many believers do with atheists. They define us as immoral, self-centered, intolerance, arrogant, and the like, much as you are doing in your article.

You cannot think of another group "that tries to sway people by demeaning them," huh? I take it you have not had the opportunity to interact with many fundamentalist Christians. Is threatening someone with hell whenever they disagree with you not demeaning? Is condemning homosexuals for being who they are not demeaning?