We Should Live - Ben Bateman

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, is a very funny man. This extends to his blog, where he delights in provoking his readers into making angry and incoherent comments. Most of the time he’s just playing the rogue, but one belief that he seems to genuinely hold is strident atheism. He thinks that religious believers are dupes and fools, and that anyone with sufficient intelligence should be able to see that the whole thing is a scam. His brief post today provides a concise summary of his attitude on the subject. A taste:

Allow me to summarize every discussion of atheism that has ever occurred on the Internet:

Atheist: “Religion is irrational.”

Believer: “Oh yeah? Atheism is a religion too, because it’s a cause that’s believed on faith! See Merriam-Webster’s 4th definition of religion.”

Atheist: “Atheism is religion the same way that NOT collecting stamps is a hobby.”

Believer: “You can’t prove the non-existence of God. And belief without proof is faith. Check Merriam-Webster’s second definition of faith. Therefore, atheists are irrational by definition.”

It’s always dangerous to post comments on his blog, as he frequently states that his goal is to make fools of his commenters. But today I took the bait. I’ve posted along these lines before, notably here and here. This is an attempt to condense and simplify the basic idea:

“Atheist: “Religion is irrational.””

The atheist is confusing the use of logic with the truth of the premises on which the logic is based. This is very common among atheists. Those who stridently emphasize their rationality and use of logic generally do not understand that all their thoughts necessarily rest on a foundation of unproven assumptions. The atheist assumes, for example, that he is capable of understanding the world around him. He assumes that he can distinguish reliable sources of information from unreliable sources.

Most importantly, the atheist assumes some moral foundation, some basic principles about what he should and shouldn’t do. And that moral foundation is usually very weak, because the atheist rarely gives it much thought. To excuse his lack of thought on the subject, he usually declares his moral assumptions to be self-evident, and then goes back to bragging about how rational and logical he is.

But morality is actually a very complicated subject—so complicated that a single lifetime of experience and reflection is not nearly enough to produce a system of moral thought that is both internally consistent and complete enough to cover nearly every situation in which people find themselves. It is therefore irrational for an individual to attempt to generate a moral system on his own. There isn’t enough time.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do it all yourself. Wise men throughout history have collected a wealth of experience with different morally challenging situations, and they’ve devoted countless hours to reflecting on these situations and generating systems of thought that can handle them all with internal consistency.

So if you’re serious about morality, then you can’t really escape the necessity of relying on these older systems of moral thought. But there’s one hitch: Those older systems of moral thought are called religions. So if you are emotionally conditioned to reject anything connected to religion, then you are doomed to moral idiocy.

UPDATE

Blogger Vox Day left an excellent comment along similar lines on Scott’s blog, and posted it on his own blog. An excerpt:

The irrationalism of atheism does not refer to its being a faith-based religion, although for many atheists this describes their adherence to sciencism rather nicely. Instead, it refers to the average atheist’s adherence to Christian morality, subtracting only some of the sexual aspects, despite having no rational basis for doing so.

(This is the point when most atheists will usually argue that one COULD construct a morality sans God, strangely, very few ever claim to have in fact successfully done so or can cite any successful constructions that aren’t a basic utilitarian pitfall. Nor do they explain the coincidental way in which their newly conceived morality so closely happens to resemble the wider morality in which they have been raised. As Joseph Heller wryly puts it, these “Scheisskopf” know exactly in which God they don’t believe.)

We have here three types of angry speech.  Let’s distinguish them.

Jeremiad is Biblical.  The Old Testament’s Book of Lamentations is also known as the Lamentations of Jeremiah, as Jeremiah is traditionally considered its author.  This book describes his anguish at the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 587BC by the army of Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar.  He focuses his anger on the Hebrews, who have obviously brought this suffering down on themselves and their city with their sinful ways.  So the emphasis with ‘jeremiad’ is on anger laced with sorrow and blame.

Harangue is German in origin. A ‘hring’ was a ring or public square set aside for public gatherings and orations.  Now the word refers to the speech rather than the ring itself, and the modern implication is of an angry speech.  So the emphasis here is anger expressed in public.

Tirade is French for a shot or volley, and before that from an Italian verb for drawing back and shooting.  So the connotation of ‘tirade’ is almost military.  The speech is not merely angry; it’s designed to hurt others.

Hotair.com links to a BBC show in which a reporter went undercover into British mosques and filmed various speakers. It’s tempting for Westerners to imagine that most of Islam is a reasonable, peaceful religion, and that the Muslims who strap bombs to their children are just fringe lunatics.

For Americans with liberal or anti-Christian inclinations, it’s difficult for them to resist projecting their view of Christianity onto Islam. In this view, most Christians are perfectly normal and acceptable as long as they don’t take their religion too seriously, and then there are the kooks out there on the fringe who get just a bit too excited about the whole God thing. This view usually lumps together the Mormons, Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and Catholics who actually believe themselves bound by what the Pope says, along with any smaller Christian groups that worship too energetically or take the Bible too literally.

I think that’s a ridiculous caricature of American Christianity, but let’s leave that topic for another day. It’s much more important right now to understand how poorly that cartoon fits with modern Islam. If a Christian suggests that a schoolchild should be free to pray in class, then the ACLU screams theocracy even though it knows that the charge is absurd. But the Muslims really do want theocracy, and they say so quite plainly when they think that only other Muslims are listening.

It may turn out that one of the most serious casualties of the Left’s war on religion is the destruction of religious words in our language, and our consequent inability to think and talk clearly about religion. ‘Theocracy’ is a perfect example. The word once had a definite meaning, and there are many Islamic governments that fit it perfectly. But the Left has abused that poor word for so long that it’s just a political buzzword now, the sort of thing you expect to hear from the Left if President Bush were to ask Americans to pray for our troops’ safety. So now we have no word left to use when faced with real theocracies, or with British Muslims who talk seriously among themselves about imposing them.

The BBC show is on YouTube cut into three parts: 1, 2, and 3. It’s vital to understand that the Muslim clerics in these videos aren’t on the fringe of Islam. Several segments come from the largest mosque in London, which has received substantial support from the British government. These men are seriously preaching thoughts nearly inexpressible in America: the complete subjugation of women, the death penalty for homosexuality or for leaving Islam, the democratic destruction of democracy, and the religious imperative to kill unbelievers—especially Jews.

The good news is that the situation in Britain is now dire enough that even the BBC has taken notice. The bad news is that the response by the BBC and the British government will almost certainly be more of the same multi-culti liberal mush that has brought them so far down the path to destruction. But at least we Americans can watch, and learn.

Update (1-18-07): Here is a National Review editor reviewing a book titled American Fascists — The Christian Right and The War on America.  And that’s not an ironic title; the author is completely sincere in his belief that America will soon become a fascist theocracy.  A sample: “A group of religious utopians, with the sympathy and support of tens of millions of Americans, are slowly dismantling democratic institutions to establish a religious tyranny, the springboard to an American fascism.”

It’s unsurprising that someone would write such a book.  This is a big country.  It’s disappointing that a major publisher like Simon & Schuster would print it, and discouraging that it would reach an Amazon sales rank of 584.  But this is what should really make you sick: The author, Chris Hedges, worked for 15 years at the New York Times and won a Pulitzer Prize.  It’s an excellent demonstration of how deeply the old-school media outlets hate Middle America.

Remember Carmen Clamaco?  She was the woman from El Salvador who was convicted of strangling her healthy full-term newborn.  The New York Times ran an article claiming that she was in prison for having an abortion at 18 weeks.  The NYT has since issued a half-hearted correction.

It’s always tempting to assume that this sort of error is simple negligence.  After all, the NYT publishes an enormous newspaper every day.  Surely it’s inevitable that some errors will creep in.

The only cure for these fits of groundless generosity is to follow several of these stories over the years, watching uncanny coincidence after uncanny coincidence pile up until your generosity is exhausted.

Let’s accelerate that exhaustion: The Observer has reprinted the Jack Hitt article, including the definitely false statements about Carmen Clamaco.  It ran the story on January 14, six days after the NYT had issued its correction.  And if you are somehow tempted to imagine that reprinting this proven lie is somehow just a big misunderstanding, consider this sentence from the teaser paragraph before the article itself: “Jack Hitt reports from El Salvador where evangelical anti-abortion laws have put women’s rights back in the dark ages.”

Are there any liberals who still bother to pretend that rampant liberal media bias is a figment of the conservative imagination?

These three sound similar and all refer to some type of motion, so they’re easy to confuse.

Careen indicates a tilting or swaying motion. It comes from a Latin word for the underside of a ship. The original meaning of ‘careen’ was to turn a ship on its side, so that the underside was exposed. Now it can refer to any kind of leaning or tilting. So to describe a car as careening would suggest that two of the wheels literally left the ground, so that the underside was exposed.

Career as a verb emphasizes speed. No one seems to know why, or even to have any good theories. My best wild guess is that it sounds like variants of the Latin word for running, such as ‘correr’ (to run) in Spanish.

Carom indicates that the moving object is bouncing off of something. The root comes a Spanish word for the red ball in billiards, which in turn came from the name of an orange fruit native to southern India. So when using this word, think of a pool table and sudden changes of direction.

Islam today is rapidly expanding, both demographically and culturally, against the void that is modern Western Civilization. Anyone who reads Mark Steyn understands that. Steyn usually emphasises Islam’s strength and pays less attention to the West’s weaknesses, but in this column he turns his rapier wit to a major reason for the West’s decline: the intellectual decline of the major Protestant denominations.

He focuses on the Anglican Church, which is hardly fair. Most of the big Protestant denominations are intellectually rotten, but the Anglicans are probably the most thoroughly so. With this advantage Steyn easily demonstrates his point by quoting from the Niagra Anglican, which is the official newspaper of the Diocese of Niagra.

A diocese, for those as unschooled in church tradition as I am, is a major territorial subdivision of the larger church. There are about two dozen diocese in Canada, and the Niagra Diocese includes about 115 parishes, with probably one church per parish. So Niagra Anglican is not some crackpot leaflet distributed by the Canadian equivalent of Fred Phelps. Nor is it the equivalent of a single errant church’s newsletter to its members. This is established vehicle through which the regional leaders communicate with the rank-and-file members.

If you are currently eating, then you might want to finish before reading any further.

Next to having sex, a good bowel movement rates pretty high on most people’s scale of things that satisfy. In fact, as you grow older, a good poop can be as rewarding as a good romp under the covers. You know the relief that comes after having been frustrated for so many days to finally stand proudly before your accomplishment floating in the toilet bowl and congratulate yourself on a job well done.

. . .

The New Testament tells us that Jesus ate a lot. He went to wedding banquets, to people’s homes for dinner and he apparently ate a lot of loaves and fishes. After all that eating and drinking, do you suppose that he waited until he was seated upon the heavenly throne to take a crap? Or, did he squat down behind a bush with James and John, farting and pushing like the rest of us?

Did Jesus defecate while he was here on earth? Of course he did! I suppose if we knew the exact spot where he laid down his ‘load’, today a shrine would be erected to remember the event; the Church of the Holy Sh_t.

. . .

Did Jesus have sex? Again, like crapping, the gospels are silent on the subject of Jesus’ sex life. . . . [M]aybe later in life, as popular teacher and preacher, he did have sex with some of his women admirers. But I’m just guessing, basing my theory not on anything biblical or scholarly, but on what I know about guys. (more…)

Bashing the mainstream media for its inaccuracies and left-wing bias has become so easy that there’s hardly much sport in it. But this case is so tidy that it deserves mention:

On April 9, 2006, the New York Times magazine published a long piece about how abortion is illegal in El Salvador. It’s the puffy, emotionally driven type of story that still passes for news, especially among the older generations. On the last page of that story the author interviews Carmen Climaco, whom the author concludes was sentenced to 30 years in prison for having an abortion. The article implies that the case would likely have been dismissed had the judge known about an alleged rule of thumb among prosecutors that any baby over a pound was arguably viable.

You have to read that last page closely to get some idea of an alternative viewpoint:

“I stood up and it felt like something fell out of me.” It took her a while to understand just what had happened. “I put my hand on its throat to see if it was moving,” she said, “which is why my fingerprints were found on its neck.” . . .

She has compressed her story into a dense, simple tale of innocence — she just woke up covered in blood — to hold up against the public accusation of baby-strangling.

The author hopes that we will share his prejudice against prosecutors and assume this to be an obvious case of anti-abortion fanatics run amok. But reality is always more complicated than ideologically driven fairly tales.

Now we know more about Carmen Climaco, no thanks to the New York Times. LifeSiteNews obtained court records in the case and uncovered a tale that makes far more sense. Authorities found Ms. Clamaco’s baby hidden under her bed, in a box wrapped in bags. The court’s decision, in Spanish, is available here. I know just enough Spanish to pick out some pieces of it.

The key witness was Dr. Alfredo Eduardo Escobar Abarca, who notes that: 1) the infant appeared to have gestated to full term, 2) it had severe hemorrhaging around its neck consistent with strangulation, which could not have been caused by the normal traumas of childbirth, and 3) two different tests confirmed that the baby had air in its lungs when it died, meaning that it had taken its first breath.

LifeSiteNews also noted that Mr. Hitt’s main source of information for the story was Ipas, a charity/company that sells abortion equipment. Ipas apparently went so far as to launch a campaign to free Ms. Climaco, though it has since withdrawn that page from its web site.

So far it’s just another day of dishonest reporting from the MSM. But the story’s real shocker is an admission from the NYT’s ombudsman, Byron Calame, that the portion of the story about Ms. Climaco was patently false, and that Mr. Hitt had relied on a translator who worked for Ipas, which then used the NYT story to seek donations. All the facts are there, though the conclusion is more tepid than we on the right would wish: “Accuracy and fairness were not pursued with the vigor Times readers have a right to expect.” Blogger See-Dubya analyses Mr. Calame’s article here, and emphasises that the NYT arrogantly dismissed complaints about the article before it had even received an English translation of the key court ruling. In fact, the NYT still refuses to retract the story, apologize, or even admit the error.

Michelle Malkin summarizes the whole mess in her JWR column, and via video here on Hot Air. And today she reports that Mr. Calame’s position is likely to be terminated. See, when government employees sacrifice national security to settle their petty scores, the drive-by media calls them heroic whistleblowers. But report on the drive-by media’s own ideologically driven mistakes, and they fire you.

Update:

Dawn Eden has also posted on this story, and generated a lively discussion in which I’m participating.