So, onward to more of the “10 Things Christians and Atheists Can (And Must) Agree On,” by David Wong, of Cracked.com.  Here’s a ray of hope!

2.  Both Sides Really Do Believe What They’re Saying.

Great!  Seems like atheists have been saying this forever!  Whole books have been filled with that obnoxious insistence that everyone really does believe in god, and the god of the Bible in particular, so all us unbelievers are really only rebelling out of attachment to our sin, not out of genuine doubt and skepticism.  I am totally on board with this point …

But atheists do something very similar, particularly when a Christian says:

“Only the saved go to Heaven!”

…and what the atheist hears is:

“I want everyone else to go to Hell!”

It’s the same thing, thinking that deep down Christians don’t really believe this is the law handed down by a creator, and therefore Christianity is just a petty, intentional rebellion against the non-Christians of the world. In other words, that Christians don’t honestly believe what they say, and just say it because they’re jerks.

Um, what?  I’m honestly baffled how the author gets from point A to point B, here.  First off, yes, the statement, “only the saved go to heaven” does imply the statement, “the unsaved are going to hell.”  That’s a basic part of Christian dogma, one that a huge majority of mainstream Christians agree with.

This DOES NOT imply the accusation that Christians don’t “really believe” in heaven and hell.  Such a argument would be stupid, it would be completely wrong, but atheists don’t actually make that claim.

I might occasionally ask something like, “If you really believe that you’ll live forever in heaven after you die, why do you have health insurance?  Wear your seat-belt?  Mourn when a Christian loved one dies?  You don’t seem to actually welcome that paradise.”  I’m not actually suggesting that they don’t believe in heaven, though, only that they hold mutually exclusive beliefs, and that they should address the contradiction.

The Christian insistence that everyone literally believes in their god, and only pretends otherwise because we love our immoral lifestyles, however, is a different beast entirely.  That’s what Christians actually claim, in literal words.  They fill whole books with it, in fact.  Ray Comfort’s book “You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, but You Can’t Make Him Think” makes that blunt assertion dozens of times, almost on every page.

The author goes on and on about this; that atheists just have to accept that Christians genuinely believe in their religion.  Um, we know that, and I’ll do you one better.

That’s the problem.

Think about it for a minute.  Is it more offensive for a person to say, “eh, sure, I suppose hell is real, the Bible says so after all …” while not really believing it, or for a person to state with confidence and genuine belief, “yes, hell is a very real, literal place of torment for anyone who doesn’t agree with my religious beliefs, and it’s entirely deserved”?

3.  In Everyday Life, You’re Not That Different.

Well, again, Wong nails the one half …

You Christians, if the transmission in your Camaro explodes, are you going to use prayer to reconstruct it? No, you’ll call a mechanic. When your tooth hurts, you don’t assume it’s possessed by demons. You look for a cavity. Basic, everyday troubleshooting.

Well, at the very worst, the atheists are just applying the same common sense, real-world troubleshooting to the God question. At the creation of the universe and in the heart of mankind, they expect to find the same physical, tangible answers they’d find inside a burnt transmission. If they’re wrong about God, they’re only wrong in that they’ve taken the tried-and-true troubleshooting we all practice one step too far.

… yup, pretty much, though I’ll add that I don’t think you can take a “tried-and-true” method of rationality and critical thinking “too far,” not without a really good reason to abandon that method.

Now, how do you think we atheists supposedly act like Christians in our “everyday life”?

Atheists, even if you reject the idea of God completely and claim to live according only to the cold logic of the physical sciences, you all still live as if the absolute morality of some magical lawgiver were true.

No, wait. Don’t go away.

When some guy hustles you out of eighty bucks in an ebay scam, you don’t nod and say, “Interesting! This fellow lacks the genetic predisposition toward equitable dealing that generations of sexual selection in favor of social behavior has instilled in the rest of us! A fascinating difference!”

Yes, yes, ladies and gents, it’s the classic “but you believe in morality just like us Christians!” argument.

This is a strawman version of rationality (I’m going to link to that video from Skepticon IV, by Julia Galef, more than once in this series, so you might as well watch it now – it’s a great talk).  Being “rational” doesn’t mean that you must disavow all statements that can’t be proved or disproved with lab coats and test tubes, for Pete’s sake!

I desire a world in which the safety and freedom of people is as great as possible.  It is, in fact, logical to conclude that blatant deception and fraud are immoral, considering that such behavior harms these goals.  These facts are not negated by the lack of any god’s existence.  Gyah.

He has another example though!

When that “boob at the Super Bowl” incident happened a while back, I constantly heard atheists making fun of Christians and their puritan silliness over sex. “Come on! It’s just meat! We’re all just mammals! Sex is natural! What are you afraid of?!?!?”

Yet, the moment you find out that while you were on vacation, your girl got drunk and slept with the entire Chicago Bears…

HA!  So!  Two easy responses to this:  One, my wife can totally do the horizontal polka with a major sports team, though depending on how drunk she was, I’d be very concerned about the matter of consent.  I’d also argue strenuously against an atheist who insists that it’s objectively wrong for a woman to have more than one partner at one time.

Of course, most people DO consider their significant other to be morally wrong for doing such a thing.  The problem is that the author is conflating the sex with the act of knowingly betraying a commitment (again, there’s the issue of consent in this particular case, but let’s keep it simple, here).  The example implies that there was a monogamous commitment, or at least rules against impromptu gang-bangs.  It’s the breaking of a promise and commitment that’s unethical, not the sex.

Well, at the very worst, the Christians are just taking that same moral impulse and applying it to the God question. At the creation of the universe, they expect to find the same invisible hand that pushes us to be fair and loyal and kind. If they’re wrong about God, they’re only wrong in that they’ve taken that absolute morality and put a face on it, made an idol out of it. Taken it one step too far.

Yeah, see, there’s a problem with that; we have lots of very blunt evidence that the universe does not share our sense of morality.  Almost all of the sheer volume of the universe kills us humans really quickly.  Natural disasters of all kinds, and whole barrages of countless diseases …  The universe is not “fair and loyal and kind.”  The evidence is painfully clear; the Christian side of this equation is factually wrong.

Next time, a point I can totally agree with!

David Wong is a very talented veteran writer for Cracked.com, and one of his classic articles from a while back is “10 Things Christians and Atheists Can (And Must) Agree On.”  Usually Cracked.com is a great way to kill time with some funny cultural insights, or random history and such.  Of course, they don’t usually address Christianity and/or atheism.  Accordingly, there are a few things on which I have a comment or five …

There are ten major points to the article, as well as a few random thoughts on the side.  After a bit of seeming confusion over the fact that Wong is just now noticing the existence of outspoken, confident atheists, he gives an example of what he feels that atheists and Christians should be able to totally agree on (not one of his main ten points, just an aside).

Celebrating the death of somebody you disagreed with pretty much makes you a dick.

Er, kind of?  In general, I’ll agree with this, with the stipulation that sometimes, someone is just plain a bad person, bad enough to justify pointing that out, even after they die.  What does Wong actually mean, here, specifically?

Regarding the death of Jerry Falwell:  ”But you start cheering his death, you’ve walked away from the one single baseline every remotely moral person has ever agreed on: the value of human life. And I know we all agree on that, because we can all think of people we could’ve otherwise stabbed and gotten away with it.”

Er, not quite.  There’s a really big difference between acknowledging that the world is a better place without a genuinely terrible person like Falwell, and literally claiming that he deserved death for being an active and egregious bigot.  Conflating the two isn’t going to get us anywhere.

Okay, okay, so maybe that was just a random tangent.  Let’s take a look at his first big point of agreement that supposedly needs to happen, eh?

1.  You Can Do Terrible Things in the Name of Either One.

… *headdesk*

You can probably tell where this is going.

Yeah, yeah, I know the Christians are saying that the guy who fights an unjust or needless war is violating God’s law, and thus isn’t a good Christian. Meanwhile, the atheists are saying that Stalin was merely bloodthirsty, separate and apart from his disbelief in a higher power. Both believe, then, that it is a corruption of their belief system that allows unjust slaughter to happen.

Um, no.  No atheist I know would say that it’s a “corruption” of atheism that justifies atrocities.  Atheism just says that there’s no gods.  Or we lack a belief in gods.  Something to that effect.  Reread those sentences if necessary.  I don’t see any justification for such atrocities.  Weird, those sentences don’t even mention genocide.

In contrast, “unjust or needless wars” are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Biblical atrocities.  So when the Christian cries in vain that Hitler was a perversion of Biblical beliefs, we can confidently bury them in their own scripture, where their god explicitly commands such atrocities.  No need to try and argue that “a god exists” implies “kill lots of people” (because that would be stupid, as stupid as the notion that “no god exists” implies “kill lots of people”).  The Bible itself describes in detail the violence that Yahweh commands from his followers.

That’s kind of … a huge, painfully obvious difference, eh?  Never mind the specific kind of knowledge held up by religion in general and Jesus in particular, namely faith.  Others have written eloquently about how the idea of faith is uniquely effective at keeping people from thinking critically about morality; seriously, go read it.

End Part 1; back for more later.

JT Eberhard has picked me up as a contributor/co-author to his blog, WWJTD over at Freethought Blogs!

This change is awesome, because I usually can’t write every day and he writes several times a day.

When I wrote twice a day over here, I had a pretty good readership. Then, life happened, I graduated from college, started working, bought a house, got married, and got dogs. That significantly cut into my ability to blog. Silly life!

I’ll probably continue to write over here, too, but I am super happy to be able to blog over there. It feeds my towering ego =)

Richard Land – one of my favorite radio personalities on the local Christian radio station I listen to, wrote a piece for the Washington Post titled, “Why it’s hard to be a Christian at Christmas“. You’ve got a whole month in which no one can escape your holiday, so what could you possibly find hard about Christmas? Let’s see:

What is it like to be “Christian” in America at Christmas time? By that question I don’t mean vaguely, culturally Christian in some civil religion sense, where one may or may not attend worship services at Christmas and Easter. I mean Christian in the sense of devout, practicing Christian, whether Protestant or Catholic, attending worship services more than once weekly and seeking to lead a life of spiritual discipline according to the dictates of the Christian faith.

I imagine Christians love Christmas time. After all, you get a whole month in which you can unashamedly and repeatedly inform the entire world of your interpretation of the “true meaning” of Christmas,  righteously declaring that while the rest of the world has Christmas all wrong, you’ve got Christmas right. You get to participate in Christmas plays and pageants, listen to music dedicated to your particular myth in stores and on radio stations everywhere you go, see plastic baby Jesusii on your neighbor’s lawns, visit your family, exchange gifts as a symbolic gesture of the gift of grace and salvation Jesus gave to you, all while the friends and family who aren’t Christian come together to celebrate Christmas in a way that gives them personal meaning and happiness. Sounds nice.

The answer is that it is difficult. It is painful, with hearts that are dedicated to the Savior whose birth we supposedly celebrate, to watch the secularization and commercialization of the holiday. Bethlehem and the manger story are almost completely obliterated in a blizzard of Santa Claus, Christmas trees and consumerism masquerading as gift giving. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not at war with St. Nick and we have a Christmas tree in our home with stockings etc., but when it camouflages the true meaning of Christmas it is tragic and sad.

So sorry, but non-Christians exist out there in the world. I don’t see why you find that so hard. Some of them like certain aspects of Christmas, but prefer to celebrate the holiday in their own way. Christmas means different things to different people. For some, it’s just another day. For others, Christmas is a celebration of the supposed birth of Jesus. That you have a hard time with Christmas because some of the world chooses to celebrate Christmas in a way that you dissaprove is pretty sad. How about you celebrate it your way, and I celebrate it my way? The only family that should matter to you is your own. By insisting that everybody else celebrate Christmas your way lest you experience pain and hurt, you’re cheapening your own holiday with your own self-righteousness. There is no camouflaging except what is between your own ears.

Trying to get back to the real meaning of Christmas-the greatest gift of love and sacrifice ever given-and it was given to all, everyone on earth-reminds me of the recent experience of a close friend of mine. He cajoled and corralled his extended family (wife, children, daughters-in-law, grandchildren) to spend Thanksgiving weekend at a large cabin in the Smokies. He told me later he was very disappointed with the first part of the weekend because everyone was doing their own thing via computer, smart phone, and IPad. Then a storm hit, the power went out and as batteries ran down, they were forced to interact as a group. Using old kerosene lamps, they found some parlor games like Monopoly and ended up having a great family time together for the next day and a half.

Maybe those people were connecting with other, more interesting people, via their communication devices.

As Christians we need to turn off the fights about “Merry X-Mas” at malls and Santa Claus and “Holiday” celebrations as opposed to Christmas celebrations and unplug ourselves from the collective cacophony of the modern Christmas season. As Helen Keller put it, “The only blind person at Christmastime is he who has not Christmas in his heart.” Let us each one determine to focus on the incarnation of Jesus, God made man to save humanity from itself as the reason for the season

This paragraph here is exactly what you’re not doing. Why on earth would you have a problem with people acknowledging your holiday in a more inclusive manner or wishing you well? Why do the words “Merry X-mas” or “holiday” hurt you, cause pain, or make Christmas harder for you? That’s like being hurt and pained because your mother said, “I love all of my children” instead of, “I love you best”.

Does the world really have to wish you well using the correct words for your satisfaction? Must we really ignore all other holidays at this time of year and focus only on yours for you to be satisfied? Go hide from the melting pot of Christmas if you must, but don’t chastise everyone else for participating. Honestly, I’d much rather Christians keep their holiday to themselves, instead of forcing everyone to participate. Forcing us to participate in the particular way you deep appropriate is even more asinine.

For Christmas, I’m going to go visit my family. We have an annual Christmas party at my mom and dad’s house, where everyone exchanges gifts (nothing too extravagant), eats food, sings karaoke, plays pool, and catches up with cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. My family celebrates Christmas in a secular way, and I’m not going to let that be cheapened by people like you who insist I’m doing it wrong. I love my family, and you should go love yours too and stop whining and feeling hurt when people outside of your own circle of mythology celebrate Christmas in their own way. It makes you look like a petty crybaby.

I pray that every devout Christian in this blessed land of ours will unplug for “Christmas” as a secular, consumer extravaganza and focus on the true meaning of the birth of the Savior-the guarantee that indeed ultimately “The wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peach on earth, good will to men.”

Actually, please do. It would make me happy to have the ability to celebrate Christmas in my own way (or not at all) without being told repeatedly that I’m doing it wrong.

No two ways around it; Richard Carrier is a big name in skepticism and atheism.  Sense and Goodness Without God is one of Ziztur’s favorite books, one of the greatest inspirations of our good friend, JT Eberhard, etc.

Carrier recently wrote about, in his opinion, the irrationality of vegetarian ethics.  I agree with many of his points, and think that he’s off-base in others.  I’ll spend much more time on the points that I disagree with, mostly because I find the errors to be really, really obvious.  I’m looking forward to feedback, though, from anyone (I have a several friends who eat meat, and several who don’t).

The first several paragraphs are pretty straightforward, basically explaining that “factory farming” is not nearly as horrifying as it is often made out to be by, say, the more shrill corners of PETA.  Generally, I agree with his points here.  He says that such conditions are frequently misrepresented in propaganda videos like those of PETA.  He points out the fact that animals are not distressed by the same quality-of-life indicators as human beings are (relatively confined quarters, and the like).  Etc.

The discussion of the resource-efficiency of raising food animals is one that I freely admit that I have neither the time or the education to weigh in on.  Both sides dispute the outright factual basis of the statistics quoted by the other side.  I’m open to hearing new information on this topic, though.

I’m paying more attention to the ethical ramifications of the death and potential suffering of animals.

His explicit conclusion is that “being a vegetarian out of ‘compassion’ is irrational.”  My only … wait for it … beef with this conclusion (ha ha, I’m hilarious) is that Carrier mostly discusses the issues of factory farming.  He mainly discusses the question of animal suffering, only briefly addressing the question of actually killing a food animal.  He simply states that killing an animal humanely is not cruel.  The closest thing to an argument in defense of this assertion that I can find in the post is a simple statement that “an animal’s life is indifferent to when it dies.”  Unless I’m somehow grossly misreading this … well, it’s just plain wrong.  Trap an animal, injure it, and see if the threat of it’s life ending produces “indifference.”

He clarifies later in a comment that “being aware of the concepts of death and a future and having plans for one’s life and valuing time to live one’s life in and even having a concept of a self that would be lost by dying all requires cognitive machinery that livestock animals don’t physically posses.”

Generally, I do agree with this conclusion, and it’s implication:  I agree that the humane killing of an (non-human) animal is not such an immoral act as to make vegetarianism an ethical obligation, but if we accept that intentionally torturing an animal for simple entertainment is ethically unacceptable (as Carrier says as well), then surely there is at least some positive ethical good to reducing the number of humane animal deaths as well?

To be blunt, here’s where I think his conclusion starts to venture into strawman territory:  ”Accordingly I think being a vegetarian out of “compassion” is irrational…  It’s to treat animals like people, which they are not.”  I think the claim that animals are completely equivalent to people is a very rare minority position among even the most strident, devoted vegetarians and vegans.

Carrier himself acknowledges in the comments that chimpanzees DO meet this “self-awareness” criteria, so it seems to me that admitting to some shades of gray are a very reasonable position, instead of the black-and-white dichotomy that Carrier insists on.

The most glaring, almost laughably confused part of the post comes a bit later, though:

“I also find vegetarians irrational in their acceptance of non-vegetarians. Either eating meat is not all that immoral, or everyone they know is a villain, horrifically consuming the flesh of concentration camp victims. And yet they befriend us. Strange.”

This seems to be a textbook example of strawman/false dichotomy blend of fallacies.  If it were actually the case that a given vegetarian considered eating meat to literally be equivalent to murdering human beings, and this person also casually had lots of meat-eating friends, then yes, there’s a contradiction.  I don’t think that’s the case, though (um, not typically, anyway …).

As I mentioned, I think it’s very, very rare for even the most vehement animal rights activists to insist that factory farming is the literal equivalent of the Holocaust.  It seems to me that the vast majority of vegans and vegetarians (on ethical reasons) consider such a stance to be an ethical good, though not an absolute moral imperative (like not perpetuating genocide, for example).

“Perhaps vegetarians think taking animal lives is no more awful than flouting traffic laws or being mean to street urchins, but that would make little sense.”

… why?  Driving less than perfectly safely is less than ideal, but not worth ending a friendship over, in most people’s opinion.  Finding out that an acquaintance is an avowed racist activist likely is a deal-breaker, however.  Different things have differing ethical weights.

Saying “reducing the death and potential suffering of non-human animals carries some positive ethical weight” does not logically require a vegetarian to insist that meat-eaters are literally Nazis.  For fuck’s sake.

Photo from: http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image

Yesterday I was at the home of one of my home health clients. She is an older lady (about 80) and recovering from a fracture of her humerus. Right now, she is being cared for by her adult daughter.

Her adult daughter and I were talking about husbands because she and I planned to move this heater into the bathroom so my client could take a shower while not getting chilled. She remarked that her husband thought putting a heater in the bathroom was unsafe, but she did it anyway and planned not to tell him about it.

I mentioned to her that my husband and I get along, especially on matters of religion and politics.

Later, as my client completed her shower, her daughter asked me, “So, what religion are you?”

Of course, since I already mentioned Flimsy and I agreed on matters of religion and politics, I felt like I couldn’t say, “um, I don’t like to talk about religion at work” without seeming weird or evasive. So instead, I said, “We’re not.”

My client and her daughter seemed surprised, and my client said, “Well… You’ll come to it eventually” She said this without a hint of sarcasm or haughtiness. It was as if she said, “well, you’ll come to it eventually” after I had told her I had writer’s block.

30 minutes later, as I left her house, she said, “I love you.” to me, probably in the same way I imagine she says “I love you” to her granddaughters. The way she said this didn’t contain a hint of our previous brief conversation about religion, nor did it contain a hint of judgement – she said it very sincerely and with thanks and affection in her eyes. She didn’t say, “God loves you” – she said something earthy and real. I could tell that she meant that she thought me awesome and helpful.

I find this career very rewarding at times.

Our exchange got me thinking about the meaning of words, and how something simple like, “I love you” can mean vastly different things depending on context. If my client had acted more offended or hurt when I told her I don’t have a religion, then her “I love you” might have been far more self-righteous. We say that we love things and people so much that we cannot rely on the words alone to glean the meaning. Context is everything.