Two forms of determinism

Determinism is the view that, given the past, the future is inevitable. The idea can be developed in two different ways. One is in terms of the laws of nature. Given the laws of nature, and positions of the basic particles at some moment in the past, the laws of nature, according to natural law determinism, guarantee where all the particles in the universe will be at some point in the future. This would be an atheistic or materialistic version of determinism. Given the way the particles are in the world at, say, Jan 1, AD 1500, a perfect calculator could determine where the particles would be in when  that Christ was born in Bethlehem, when he died by crucifixion on a cross outside of Jerusalem, when Hitler would slaughter the Jews as WWII came to a close, when the Broncos beat the Panthers in the 2016 Super Bowl, when Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump won their primary races in 2016, and that Omar Mateen would shoot all those people in the gay bar. 

The other version of determinism is religious in nature. God, before the foundation of the world, creates the world and predestines every event.Thus, God predestines, before the foundation of the world, that Christ would be born in Bethlehem, that he would die by crucifixion on a cross outside of Jerusalem, that Hitler would slaughter the Jews as WWII came to a close, that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would be nominated in 2016, and that Omar Mateen would shoot all those people in the gay bar. 

If either form of determinism is true, is it Omar's fault that he killed all those people, or is he just a victim of circumstance? And what does that mean for people convicted of murder. Do they deserve a penalty because either God or the laws of nature, guaranteed that they would commit murder, while people like Abraham Lincoln and Mother Teresa were predestined or determined to do good? What happens to moral responsibility? 

Should women be silent in church

Should women be silent in church?

This author says yes, this author says no. 

Giving reasons for our hope

I Pet 3:15-16  Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who slander you will be put to shame by your good behavior in Christ.…

I wish there were something in the atheist Bible that said 

 Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the atheism that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.

But Richard Dawkins, the atheist pope, has not said this. (Just kidding). But I can at least quote this important verse to my fellow Christians. 

I do think there is a difference amongst atheists. It's not as if you can convert people on the other side by debating. Changing one's religious views is a long process considering more factors than you can put into a single discussion. But sometimes minds are changed in subtle ways that lead up to a big difference later on. 

Even where I think intellectual dishonesty is at work, I am not inclined to announce this sort of thing, simply because I am skeptical of my or anyone else's ability to psychoanalyze the thought process of my opponents. Keith Parsons, for example, can be harsh, but I have seen him influenced by serious Christian thinkers to adopt a less strident position than he had taken before.

I prefer not banning people, as you know, and recommend as a substitute for this, knowing what to ignore. But I will tell you that my blog is dedicated to the idea that real constructive dialogue is possible between believers and nonbelievers. Those who think otherwise, whether believers or nonbelievers, can post somewhere else.
.

Some notes on the issues of sexual conduct I have been discussing

The modern latitudinarians speak,
for instance, about authority in religion not only as if there were no
reason in it, but as if there had never been any reason for it. Apart
from seeing its philosophical basis, they cannot even see its historical
cause. Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or
unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present
one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to
attack the police; nay, it is glorious. But the modern critics of
religious authority are like men who should attack the police without
ever having heard of burglars. -G. K. Chesterton Orthodoxy
The Bible was written to suppress people---Larry Flynt

Let me clarify my position on these issues somewhat better. My original comments on this issue was occasioned by Richard Carrier's sexual harassment issues, but also in response to some issues in the recent history of the atheist community, such as Elevatorgate.

I mentioned that a more liberal view of sexual conduct is often a selling point for atheism. I did not mean to suggest that people who are atheists are atheists because they want sex. That would be the Christian version of the Ultimate Bribe Argument. The atheist version of the Ultimate Bribe argument is that although theists present rational considerations on behalf of their religious beliefs, we can be sure that these rational considerations are not the real reasons they believe what they do. Rather, it is because they get something that cannot live without emotionally, namely the hope of eternal life. The Christian version of the UBA says that atheists don't want to think of their sex life as morally wrong, nor do they want to go through the difficult and painful process of repenting of their sexual sin and observing limits to their sexual conduct, so they look for any excuse they can to deny the truth of Christianity, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that supports it.

 But I think a lot of people think that a more liberal sexual ethic is an important side benefit of atheism, one that liberates a person from the guilt they might feel if they have failed to satisfy what they believe Christianity requires of them. While eternal life is a motivating factor for some Christians, sexual freedom is a motivating factor for some atheists. But if these arguments are pressed far enough, they become discussion stoppers. Any attempt on either side to offer an intellectual reason for believing one way or the other can be stopped just by saying "I don't care what you say, I know why you REALLY think what you do." I realize that these explanations are appealing to people who can't see any intellectual value in their opponents' position. And I think we do have to be aware of the ways in which nonrational considerations might affect our beliefs, and that we might be less rational than we think we are. But in thinking about what our opponents believe, all we have are possible psychological explanations.

What I said was that we shouldn't be too terribly surprised if the atheist community has a problem with sexual harassment. Some have suggested that these problems have arisen because atheist communities are more sensitive to sexual harassment and take it more seriously than others.

But I think there is another possible explanation. Possibly secularists, in overreaction to the sexually restrictive character of the world's leading religions, have, as it were, fallen off the horse on the other side, and are not willing to recognize that sex, like every other type of activity, must be guarded by ethics, and that in this area as in others, there are times when we would very much like to do what would really be highly unethical and wrong. The Orthodoxy quotation, though it concerns a somewhat different matter, suggests the direction of my complaint. To read some people of a secularist persuasion, there is no possible reason why any reasonable person would ever want to have moral rules restricting sexual behavior. Thus, sexual behavior gets a pass even when it does harm in a way that other conduct does not. The exception seems to be a requirement that the parties consent, but even here the complexities of what really constitutes consent is simply not recognized. 

In C. S. Lewis's Essay "Have We No Right to Happiness," Lewis points out a blind spot that modern people have concerning sex:

“After all,” said Clare. “they had a right to happiness.”

We were discussing something that once happened in our own neighborhood. Mr. A. had deserted Mrs. A. and got his divorce in order to marry Mrs. B., who had likewise got her divorce in order to marry Mr. A. And there was certainly no doubt that Mr. A. and Mrs. B. were very much in love with one another. If they continued to be in love, and if nothing went wrong with their health or their income, they might reasonable expect to be very happy.

It was equally clear that they were not happy with their old partners. Mrs. B. had adored her husband at the outset. But then he got smashed up in the war. It was thought he had lost his virility, and it was known that he had lost his job. Life with him was no longer what Mrs. B. had bargained for. Poor Mrs. A., too. She had lost her looks—and all her liveliness. It might be true, as some said, that she consumed herself by bearing his children and nursing him through the long illness that overshadowed their earlier married life.

You mustn’t, by the way, imagine that A. was the sort of man who nonchalantly threw a wife away like the peel of an orange he’d sucked dry. Her suicide was a terrible shock to him. We all knew this, for he told us so himself. “But what could I do?” he said. “A man has a right to happiness. I had to take my one chance when it came.”

Lewis goes on to add: 

Clare, in fact, is doing what the whole western world seems to me to have been doing for the last 40-odd years. When I was a youngster, all the progressive people were saying, “Why all this prudery? Let us treat sex just as we treat all our other impulses.” I was simple-minded enough to believe they meant what they said. I have since discovered that they meant exactly the opposite. They meant that sex was to be treated as no other impulse in our nature has ever been treated by civilized people. All the others, we admit, have to be bridled. Absolute obedience to your instinct for self-preservation is what we call cowardice; to your acquisitive impulse, avarice. Even sleep must be resisted if you’re a sentry. But every unkindness and breach of faith seems to be condoned provided that the object aimed at is “four bare legs in a bed.”

Let's start with Richard Dawkins. Remember his comments downplaying the sexual misconduct of even Catholic priests? Or his Dear Muslima comments about Rebecca Watson's complaints about how men pursued sex at atheist conventions. Watson, to be sure, is anything but an advocate of traditional sexual ethics. She objected to the way in which such sex was pursued. Yet, somehow by making these complaints Dawkins implied that somehow she was trivializing the suffering of women living under Sharia law, or suffering female genital mutilation.

Or consider Darrel Ray's denial that sex addicts exist. That people pursue sex compulsively, even when it harms themselves, their families, and their careers, seems as obvious as can be, and to deny this seems like a great occasion for the Strait answer: 

I got some ocean front property in Arizona.
From my front porch you can see the sea.
I got some ocean front property in Arizona.
If you'll buy that, I'll throw the golden gate in free.

I am certainly not suggesting that Christians don't have blind spots when it comes to sexual issues. Chief amongst these has been the tendency in Christian groups to make sexual compliance a litmus test for spiritual success, and the mistaken idea, very prevalent until recently, that same-sex attraction is always repairable.

However, traditional sexual ethics facilitates a stable atmosphere for childrearing, eliminates the need to market oneself throughout life as a sexual partner, and prevents people with money and power from taking using that power for sexual benefit. Even from a secular standpoint, these goals need to be taken seriously. 

The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument

A Reasonable Faith video. 

Could God be mistaken?

If the Christian God exists, doesn't he get to decide what is right or wrong? Or could an existing God be mistaken about, for example, whether gay relationships are right or not.

Consider the following scenario: God created the world, and decreed that marriage was the only proper place for sex, and that marriage was a relationship between a man and a woman. But, he got it wrong, and gay was really OK.

Is that scenario even possible? 

Mormon polygamy

 A Mormon believes that God spoke first in the Bible, then in the Book of Mormon, Doctrines and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price, and now though the Prophet, Seer and Revelator of the Mormon Church. Mormons actually believe that in the time of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, God allowed plural marriage, but Prophet, Seer and Revelator William Woodruff claimed to have heard from God in the late 19th Century that plural marriage had to stop. Of course the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints does not believe that Woodruff really heard from God on this, and so they continue to practice plural marriage. 

From Dreher's Sex After Christianity

The entire essay is here. 

It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.

In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.

Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.

It would be absurd to claim that Christian civilization ever achieved a golden age of social harmony and sexual bliss. It is easy to find eras in Christian history when church authorities were obsessed with sexual purity. But as Rieff recognizes, Christianity did establish a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways.

What makes our own era different from the past, says Rieff, is that we have ceased to believe in the Christian cultural framework, yet we have made it impossible to believe in any other that does what culture must do: restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes.

If Christian sexual ethics is mistaken, secularists need to work on a replacement

It is a selling point (not the only relevant reason, surely), and what is happening could turn out to be growing pains. But with respect to sexual ethics, there is too much criticism of the Christian tradition without serious attempts to clarify what is and is not morally acceptable. Christian traditionalists have a clear set of rules. Maybe too clear.

But tradition rules serve an important purpose, they protect relationships from the ravages of competition and insure that proper care is taken for children. If you are going to criticize traditional Christianity on sex, it seems to me that a lot of serious work has to be done to clarify what is moral, and what is not. A simplistic appeal to "consent" is not enough. How the vulnerable can be protected and children are to be cared for still has to be developed in a replacement sexual morality, and I see to little work done on that.

If there are strong standards of conduct that are difficult to follow, then you are going to have problems with people pretending to follow them who really don't, hence the problems on the Christian side. If there are really no rules, no occasions when a sexual impulse ought morally to be resisted, then there can't be any problems. But that doesn't seem plausible. You are probably going to have a certain number of people who find freedom from traditional rules who take it too far the other way, and this should surprise no one.

There are going to have to be rules, and it should be an important element in secularist thought to provide those replacement rules. But I see too little of it.

Two pictures of the moral life

According to the picture some people present, people ordinarily think of what is best unless their religion interferes, in which case they unthinkingly do what they were taught. 

Other people think of this differently. They think that, without religion, our actions have no everlasting consequences, and therefore there is no reason not to do what will be good for yourself, (as opposed to others). On the other hand, if a religious belief is true, then you have a reason to do what will make others happy, since you may have to live with them forever. 

Both pictures seem oversimplified. Is there truth in both, or neither? 



Surprise, surprise

Secularist organizations seem to be having a lot of trouble with sexual harassment. 

You have to ask "What did you think was going to happen?" One of the key selling points of secularism is that you don't have to follow those benighted old restrictions on sexual conduct imposed by those nasty, prudish and repressive Christians. And then, lo and behold, vulnerable people are threatened by the out-of-control libidos of such "liberated" people." 

Surprise, surprise. Next thing you know, we will be finding out that gambling is going on in Casablanca. 

George Will leaves the Republican Party

Will's father was emeritus at the University of Illinois when I was there. 

http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/25/politics/george-will-donald-trump-leaving-republican-party-election/

Jim Slagle's New AFR book

I've read his master's thesis and dissertation, and I like Jim's work. He also convinced me that Lewis was using the word "irrational" correctly in the first edition of Miracles, even though, under pressure from Anscombe's critique, he changed his term to "nonrational."

From Chesterton's The Dumb Ox

Thus, even those who appreciate the metaphysical depth of Thomism in other matters have expressed surprise that he does not deal at all with what many now think the main metaphysical question; whether we can prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real. The answer is that St. Thomas recognised instantly, what so many modern sceptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously; that a man must either answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask. I suppose it is true in a sense that a man can be a fundamental sceptic, but he cannot be anything else: certainly not even a defender of fundamental scepticism. If a man feels that all the movements of his own mind are meaningless, then his mind is meaningless, and he is meaningless; and it does not mean anything to attempt to discover his meaning. Most fundamental sceptics appear to survive, because they are not consistently sceptical and not at all fundamental. They will first deny everything and then admit something, if for the sake of argument--or often rather of attack without argument. I saw an almost startling example of this essential frivolity in a professor of final scepticism, in a paper the other day. A man wrote to say that he accepted nothing but Solipsism, and added that he had often wondered it was not a more common philosophy. Now Solipsism simply means that a man believes in his own existence, but not in anybody or anything else. And it never struck this simple sophist, that if his philosophy was true, there obviously were no other philosophers to profess it.




G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox. New York: Image Books, 1933, pp. 148-49.

Against recycling

Even recycling has its critics. Here.

Is underpopulation the real problem?

Here.

This is, of course, from a pro-life Catholic organization. I get the idea that most of our forbears, had they been asked what, if anything, is wrong with homosexuality, would raise fears of underpopulation. Even ancient societies with relatively pro-gay attitudes, such as the ancient Greeks, would not consider gay marriage because gay relationships could never replace the population maintenance role played by heterosexual marriages.

Mosher: Like other baby boomers, I lived through the unprecedented doubling of the global population in the second half of the 20th century. Never before in human history had our numbers increased so far, so fast: from three billion in 1960 to six billion in 2000. But the population alarmists, I came to see, glossed over the underlying reason: Our numbers didn’t double because we suddenly started breeding like rabbits. They doubled because we stopped dying like flies. Fertility was falling throughout this period, from an average of six children per woman in 1960 to only 2.6 by 2005.

Still, there seems to be little concern about population maintenance. 

What does it mean to say "I have a right to my opinion?"

What does it mean to say that I have a right to my opinion? If I have a right to life, it implies that some powerful person cannot take my life away from me without justification. How would someone take your opinion away from you, short of brain surgery? 

Learning fallacies from Trump

Here. 

Does Dawkins base his "religion is child abuse" argument on one letter?

No, he doesn't. He bases it on intuition. It can't be wrong if it feels so right. 

Richard Dawkins: That is of course true. And I am not basing it on that. It seems to me that telling children, such that they really, really believe, that people who sin are going to go to hell, and roast forever, forever, that your skin grows again when it peels off from burning, it seems to me to be intuitively entirely reasonable that that is a worse form of child abuse, that it will give more nightmares, that will give more genuine distress, if they don’t believe it its not a problem, of course.

What does the evidence say? This. 

How Gnu are you

Test yourself here. 

An implicit premise in the gay rights debate

Race and gender are about who you are and are unchangeable (transgender cases aside). Actively pursuing a homosexual sexual orientation is about what you do. Opponents of gay marriage often say that there is nothing wrong with being gay, the only problem is gay sexual activity.

To hold this position, however, you have to abandon a culturally popular belief, that a sex life is essential to human happiness.

For example, colleges like Wheaton College are often accused of discriminating against homosexuals because they have code of conduct that proscribe homosexual activity. But did you know that a Bible professor at Wheaton College, Wesley Hill, is openly gay. Ah, you say, that doesn't count. Hill is committed to a celibate lifestyle. But he is not only a gay man, he's most certainly NOT in the closet.

But if a sex life is essential to human happiness, what happens to people who can only pursue that happiness with children? What about persons with a spouse for whom intercourse is painful? What about someone married to someone whose sexual ability has been destroyed through injury?

Since I love to illustrate points with songs, this song, Ruby don't take your love to town,  is about a man injured in Vietnam whose wife has decided to run around.

It couldn't happen here, could it?

From Religious Culture: Faith in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia, by Jerry Pankhurst, in Russian Culture, 2012.

Socialization objectives.

 The atheistic socialization agenda included a wide range of positive incentives. Proper behavior and attitudes were reenforced by legitimate authority and thus carried a positive emotional charge. Atheistic socialization had as its ultimate goal what Soviet writers called "a scientific atheistic worldview," which included the following elements:

 (1) Strong scientific training awaited all students, starting from the earliest grades. Science was always taught as the indubitable and entirely sufficient way of understanding the world that left no room for alternative orientations. All other perspectives, most notably religion, were said to be incompatible with science and distorting of reality.

(2) A special emphasis was placed on the notion that humans make their own futures. There were no supernatural forces or divine entities which had any relation to the world. In Marxian terms, science was the surest basis for building the future because it recognized the true nature of the world.

(3) Atheistic socialization required teaching about the history of freethought and atheism, as well as about "religious obscurantism" that undermined the progress of science.

(4) Atheism had to have its "positive heroes" -- Charles Darwin, Galileo, Copernicus, and others. The abundant literature on such characters served an important socialization goal of creating "reference idols" to encourage the youth in particular to emulate atheistic values. [39]

(5) Movies and newspapers, television and radio, literature and painting -- all forms of mass culture had to be upgraded in content, so as to woo the population away from religious spectacles. For instance, during the Easter holidays the state would show especially popular programs on TV and keep movie theaters open into the late hours to keep the populace from attending all night Easter services.

 (6) Atheist propaganda was carried out by a sprawling set of agencies and organizations, such as the Museum of Religion and Atheism and Knowledge Society, [40] which printed pamphlets and books, offered public lectures and presentations. Through all these socializing institutions and practices the authorities sought to provide models of atheist behavior and attitudes for average Soviet citizens, to turn them into "good atheists" intolerant of religioznoe mrakobesie (religious obscurantism). But the same outcomes could be, and sometimes had to be, accomplished through other means, like punishments and costs inflicted on the believers to discourage them from practicing proscribed behavior.

 Social Control Imperatives.
Soviet believers who evaded the socialization efforts mounted by the state had to bear excessive costs for their religious activities. The state did everything it could to "overcome" religion peaceably, to make it "wither away," but when its "constructive" efforts failed, it was ready to deploy a vast array of social control devices to stamp out religious customs.

Here are some of the more important social control venues favored by the Soviet state:

(1) Forbidding formal religious education for children, that is, any group classes, Sunday schools, etc.

(2) Hindering the participation of children in religious activities by pressuring and intimidating clergy, parents, and children themselves (usually in school).

 (3) Controlling baptism rites, i.e., requiring a formal "registration" and a "permit" for a baptism ceremony.

 (4) Ridiculing or criticizing believers in the public press.

 (5) Intentionally and actively seeking out believers and attempting to "reeducate" them. School teachers played a particularly important role in this regard, as did Pioneer and Komsomol cadres, Party and trade union activists at the workplace. Adults could also be force into one-on-one sessions with atheist activists.

(6) Publishing and disseminating antireligious propaganda through literature, lectures, newspaper articles, radio, and television programs. The Knowledge Society has to be singled out here for its relentless efforts on behalf of "scientific atheism," though the trade unions, party cells, atheist clubs, and antireligious museums did not lag far behind.

 (7) Manipulating religious leaders so as to limit their personal influence and ability to organize and disseminate religious influence.

(8) Limiting the prospects for appointment and job advancement for religious believers. Since most high level positions required party membership, believers were naturally excluded from advancement to such levels. In some cases, believers were denied routine pay increases and promotions because of their "backward views." Though this was not universal practice, it encouraged believers to be less visibly active religiously or hide their faith altogether, and it intimidated those who were not active from becoming so. In these and perhaps other ways, the Soviet state barred children from sympathetic exposure to religion and punished those who defied the state and sought to exercise their nominal constitutional rights. Needless to say, children who passed through this elaborate system of antireligious propaganda were less likely to become religious adults, while those who persisted in their religious beliefs and practices could expect their life options to be severely curtailed by the state.

Are Christians to blame for the Orlando attacks?

Here. 

Last I checked, the attacker was of a different religious persuasion.

Woody Guthrie's Jesus Christ

Sung by Merle Haggard.  Woody's Jesus is not a Republican.

Does Obergfell mean we can marry whoever we want?

No.

The question of the number of people you can marry, and the age of the person you can marry, is still restricted. NAMBLA, the North American Man Boy Love Association, wants to eliminate the latter restriction. The Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints wants to eliminate the former restriction. 

The testability of intelligent design

Here. 

Joe Hinman's Trace of God

Here.  It's a version of the case from religious experience.

The XYZ question concerning evidence

It goes like this. X is evidence for Y just in case Z.

I've answered the question here at various times, and people are dissatisfied with my answer. Fine. I want to know your XYZ answer. If you are going to tell me I don't have any evidence, then apparently you have a different answer to the XYZ question than I do. But when I ask people what their answer is, I never find out.

Evidence for theism from the existence of thinking beings

There are facts in existence that are vastly more probable to exist if theism is true than if it is not. In all theistic universes a thinking being exists. In many atheistic universes no thinking beings exists, and it is difficult to see how thinking beings could possibly exist. Therefore, the evident fact that there are thinking beings in our universe is evidence that God exists. It may not be enough evidence for strong atheists, but the fact that it is evidence is indubitable.

Now, this is not all of our evidence, surely, and other pieces of evidence no doubt support atheism. But this is a piece of evidence that supports theism even if a naturalistic theory of mind is defensible.

The case against reality

Here. 

This is Welty's post, that Steve is referring to.

Any sufficiently vacuous evolutionary explanation is indistinguishable from magic

Here. 

A skeptic critiques the skeptic movement

And is told he shouldn't be so skeptical of the skeptic movement.

Hypocrisy?

Some are willing to use the Establishment Clause and the demand for neutrality to silence religious advocacy in classroom at publicly funded schools, yet have no compunction about atheist advocacy in those very same institutions. 

Are they hypocrites? 

No, they’re not being hypocritical. It is wrong to advocate for a religion in the public university, because when religious ideas are presented, they have to be presented in a neutral manner, without endorsement. However, atheism is not more a religion than not collecting stamps is a hobby. Therefore we can shove atheism down your throat to our heart’s content, since it is not a religion, but is instead a non-religion, and treats all religions with equal contempt. Besides, all we’re doing when we are creating atheists is supporting science and critical thinking.

Confirmation bias in atheism

Atheists with a strong emotional aversion towards the Christian faith, apparently suffer from a confirmation bias regarding ancient history similar to the confirmation bias of certain Christian fundamentalists regarding the theory of evolution. Seen from their respective scientific specialisms, the claim that Jesus never existed is as stupid as the claim that evolution never happened. Richard Dawkins used to make the former claim (click here), followed later on by a statement that “it doesn’t really matter whether or not Jesus existed.” Well, maybe it doesn’t matter to someone who is not interested in scientific research, although Dawkins claims to foster “science and rationality”. And now we’re at it, how “rational” is Dawkins if he continuously minimizes “positive” examples of faith and religion in order to confirm his conviction that faith and religion are, in most cases, a “bad, delusional thing”? Confirmation bias, anyone? For instance, Dawkins claims that Martin Luther King’s leadership of the civil rights movement did not arise from King’s Christian beliefs. Maybe he should read King’s work first before making such statements. That’s what a scientist should do…

Here. 

Confirmation bias about confirmation bias