Chilling the Neighbor Relations

I live in an interesting little apartment building. The guy living on one side is gay and has loud, howling sex with his dates. From the guy on the other side, I hear loud Christian Radio coming through my walls.

I was talking that second neighbor today, I needed to borrow something, when he mentioned I should consider tuning in to 91.5 FM. He said, "It's Christian radio. Do you believe in Jesus."

I searched for an answer that wouldn't offend him too much, but instead came up an honest one. "I think he probably once existed." There followed a moment of icy silence.

"In all the time you live, that's the best you can do?"

"Yes, sorry."

"No, I feel sorry for you." Of course he does. I was thinking of a comedy bit where we argue about who's sorrier, already done in Dr. Strangelove. But it's better to quit while I'm ahead.

I wouldn't bet the house on it, but I think there's pretty good chance that Jesus the man did not even exist. Frank Zindler makes a strong argument in "The Jesus the Jews Never Knew." There are no reliable secular authorities that recorded him, including a  few who were in Galilee and would have written about him. There's no record of him at the time from Jewish authorities. In fact, it's impossible to say Christianity even arose from Palestine. It could have started from anywhere.

I'm not as given to this theory as Zindler, but it has merit. Why would the Founders of the Church lie so terribly? Why did L. Ron Hubbard or any cult leader lie?

Since our conversation, Christian Radio has been playing quieter from the West. From the East, I expect more from Sodom and Gomorrah tonight. And I don't mind. It's much quieter here than the place I used to live in. I guess I could crank up some hetero porn to cancel the noise scientifically, but I'm used to sleeping with earplugs and they do just find.

The Real Difference Between Atheists and Believers

God, or lack of One, isn't the biggest difference between Atheists and believers (specifically, modern monotheists of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths). The real split is on the importance of belief as a mental process, and its use in determining reality.

To an atheist, "belief" is a judgment or a guess, distinct from "thinking" in that it's not as rigorous, and from "knowing" in that it's not based on sensory information. Your mind uses judgment when there's something that cannot be confirmed through thinking or knowledge, so you use intuition.

For believers, there's "belief" and then there's "belief in." Unlike the former, the latter expresses a commitment or goal to maintain belief. "Belief in" isn't just a mental process: it's all important because it determines the outcome of a person's life for eternity, that is, forever.

"I am the Lord, thy God . . ." Modern monotheisms all require that the person "believes in" the Deity. Nobody appears to ask why this would be the most important requirement, but to conclude that there is no God, one must first stop thinking that belief can effect a change in your eternal fate. One has to be willing to come to the conclusion that one may not be a more worthy position than the other.

In other words, you have to be willing to stop corrupting judgment with expectations of reward or punishment. And that's where the real difference between atheists and believers turns. 

Losing focus and arguing against an antichoice cult

I'm up too late and have to get up too early tomorrow. Writing fiction means a hard daily schedule.

I managed to take some time to answer the Abolition Society of Oklahoma, or as I call them, ASOs. They complained that some people weren't taking them seriously and were being snarky to them, to paraphrase.

http://is.gd/GJpD7l

I've had arguments in the past with this cult, who are trying to make antichoice a religious crusade by conflating the issue with slavery, despite several humongous differences. I can't see an underground railroad for fetuses. I just can't. I also can't see Canada going along with it . . .

Anyway, this is what I wrote:

Actually, I can see their point in not trying to engage you. I've tried. It hasn't done anything, and periodically I hear, "oh, you really said nothing to support your point."

Each time that was a lie. Fact is, you never engage in a discussion sincerely, that is, entertaining any thought that anything said can change your mind. You never ask yourself what information could do it, but instead look for things to prove yourself right, and you explain away the things that to prove your wrong. Though in these respects, you're not really different from anybody else.

However, you also make logical arguments with terms defined to bolster the conclusion you've already made, affirming the antecedent and making circular arguments regularly. You have a faith-based religion, which means you have a sworn duty to believe no matter what, and you've trained yourself to accept the weakest, flimsiest arguments and pseudoscience so you could keep your faith and not feel like idiots. Moreover, because you've connected your antichoice views to your religion you're committed to never changing your mind on it. Since you've also linked antichoice to an antislavery narrative, you've shifted the discussion from whether the fetus is actually a human being to winning rights for the fetus. Thus assures you will never say anything appropriate about abortion.

Even though I try to now and then, I guess because I'm human, I don't think there's any point in engaging any of you. It's like trying to engage the Moonies in a rational discussion about their beliefs. You are a cult, and more cultish than most Christian sects.

So, I'm pro-ridicule. If people aren't engaging you, but ridiculing you, maybe you shouldn't declare, claim and argue things that require proof of sanity.

It's fair to ask what would plausibly change my mind? Prove to me in a material way that there's something in a zygote besides a genome that makes it a human being. The reason I start with the zygote is that's where the antichoicers say "human life," or what I would call a "human being" begins.

I reject the argument out of hand that it's a human being/person just because it's human life with a complete, distinct, diploid human genome. Though a human being must have such, the arrow of inference only goes one way: because something has a complete, distinct, diploid human genome, it does not mean that its a human being, according to Bayes Law. For a zygote, there are a lot of necessary things missing. Like a brain and body, like any functional senses or emotions. No emotional or sensory life can be inferred from it.

So, what quality does it have? According to the ASOs say a zygote/fetus "possesses the Image of God." They don't say it's in God's image or that it looks like God, because that would immediately underscore how absurd their claim is. A zygote, a fetus and a middle-aged human cannot all be in God's image, if God is perfect and unchanging.

Now, in Genesis, Man was created in the image of God (and women from Man's rib, slightly less dignified.) Genesis 9:5-7 says, “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made mankind." A zygote doesn't have blood. I don't think I'm stretching this point: a zygote, purportedly where "life begins," cannot not be what that passage is talking about. The presumption, if you're going to use it as a moral guide, is that human beings have blood and if you shed it the human being dies. If we're going to take the poetic language about "image of God" we should take the whole thing literally. If you could kill somebody without spilling blood, it shouldn't offend God or anyone else. Poisoning might be recommended.

Now, for their exact statement, nowhere does the Bible use the phrase "possess(es) the image of God." We don't say that in the English language. If somebody looks like somebody else, we never say one possesses the others' image. In fact, if we were to say that, it means one person carries a picture of the other. It means the fetus is committing blasphemy, and probably we should stone its mother. If one is made in the others' image, we say it just like that or have. Their saying that the zygote/fetus "possesses the image of God" just avoids the questions that would normally be raised if they said it the regular way. They know this.

In doing this, the ASOs cannot be using an understood definition of "image," which is where their tactic enters the Orwellian realm. It's a statement that's meant to guide opinion, not make a proper, logical argument based even on their own faith.

Using the "image of God" argument, in other words, can be rejected outright, and it still first has to be a human being, with a completed "image of God" to apply.

So, what would I accept? I would need material proof that despite all it lacks, a single-celled zygote is something that the later, developed human being could recognize as themselves, by appearance or behavior. If it's a unique, individual human being, the unique, individual human being should be able to look at videos on how it behaves along side other zygote/fetus videos and say, "That's me!" In fact, anybody should be able to study zygotes/fetuses, study the later people, and pick out which zygote/fetus is which person, just from behavior, or perhaps appearance.

Or, I would need some physical quality that proves it's as conscious in a way that the fully developed human is. A good test: does it dream yet? If it dreams, it means that it's ready to take sensory information and synthesize a narrative from it.

Or, I would need physical proof that a soul exists, that human beings have one, and the zygote/fetus possesses it, too.

"Possessing God's image" doesn't cut it.

Atheist Morality, part 2

First I'll recap part 1

In Western Civilization, the concept of morality originated hand and hand with the concept of theism, with a concept of piety being central even for pagan cultures. Therefore, it is difficult to formulate an atheist concept of morality that's explicable to the religious, who presume that no morality could exist without God, or at least, the self-deception that there is a God.

They are wrong. As social animals, human beings are born with an inclination to find out what behaviors others expect of them and what behavior they should expect from others. More than that, find out what behaviors other people will cooperate to stop or punish, or reward. There are, of course, those who are deficient in morality, sociopaths and psychopaths, but for the most part, human beings are born to learn this.

To explain anything about atheist morality I first have to define it in a way that's not dependent on belief in God and show how it functions in a Godless universe. Like God, though, morality only exists in the mind of human beings. Unlike God, it's not an illusion. It's a behavior we all depend on.

A person is born to look for what behaviors are expected or prohibited from others, but also they are born with their own desires behaviors and so must alter their behavior and learn what the social group expects from everyone. From the interplay of these two, the person will eventually form a moral code.

(Last paragraph altered.)

To go on now:

So, the person's internal, subjective morality is then compromised with the social group's, whose code may more accurately be called inter-subjective rather than objective. The social group, by the way, might be a religion, a gang, a nation, or a political party. It might have a written code of laws that fit everyone's subjective morality just approximately. A person if free to explore, will look for one that compromises with their subjective morality the best. If a person is stuck in an authoritarian society, such as Saudi Arabia, they will generally conform their morality to it, and might become as stern as the society they are in. Since people are very adaptable.

Some of these social groups will have the morality written out in laws, such as in Christianity. In these cases, the moral code would be only a rough approximation of the inter-subjective morality of its members. The believers buy the entire package, including parts they might not personally like. Such as a believer might not have anything personally against gays & lesbians, but in Christian mythos, God, not humankind, dictates what's moral. Therefore, the believer must buy the whole code, and because they need most of it, they'll pretend to go along with all of it. Or do their level best to find reasons why being gay is sinful as murder.

Leaving psychopathic personalities out of this, atheists form their moral code exactly the same way Christians do, which is why atheists tend to be no more criminal than Christians, in fact, probably less.

So, that's a very general description of how a person forms a sense of morality or moral code.

To a large degree, people can agree on what is right and wrong, due to the fact that we're the same sort of social animal. Every moral facet also has an evolution-adaptive reason behind it, such as a disgust or outrage toward murder. It's because for any social group to be advantageous to its members, they have to be safer from each other than they would generally be without each other. Human beings evolved in strong social groups, hence, our brains create averse feelings in us regarding murder, and we act our feelings to prohibit and punish it.

Nevertheless, it's notable that there are exceptions allowed, and I'm not talking about abortion, which I will get to in the last part of this essay. Exceptions are made in the Bible. In case we think those are behind us, one was made just recently in the case of Osama bin Laden.

Atheist Morality pt. 1

In Western Civilization, the concept of morality originated hand and hand with the concept of theism, with a concept of piety being central even for pagan cultures. Therefore, it is difficult to formulate an atheist concept of morality that's explicable to the religious, who presume that no morality could exist without God, or at least, the self-deception that there is a God.

They are wrong. As social animals, human beings are born with an inclination to find out what behaviors others expect of them and what behavior they should expect from others. More than that, find out what behaviors other people will cooperate to stop or punish, or reward. There are, of course, those who are deficient in morality, sociopaths and psychopaths, but for the most part, human beings are born to learn this.

To explain anything about atheist morality I first have to define it in a way that's not dependent on belief in God and show how it functions in a Godless universe. Like God, though, morality only exists in the mind of human beings. Unlike God, it's not an illusion. It's a behavior we all depend on.

A person is born to look for what behaviors are expected or prohibited from others, but also they are born with their own desired behaviors and are forming their own expectations of others. From the interplay of these two, the person will eventually form a morality.

End of part 1, I'm afraid. I'll continue tomorrow.

Getting rid of faith: a ramble.

I should be doing some work around here. I took a benedryl this morning and immediately regretted it. Now I'm struggling to stay awake.

About atheism and religion . . .

Raised as a Catholic, I received all the training and everything, 12 years of Catholic school. My father saw it as his sworn duty to make sure I was educated in the Church. And . . . you can't be properly educated about the church in only a year or two, no you need twelve at least. That way they could thoroughly mislead you, and use you as a cash cow doing it.

Religion is lucrative for a selected number of clergy or leaders. The rest at least receive a vocation and job security supplied by the believers. This is true not just of Catholics, of course, but for every other cult, before or after being exalted to the "religion" status. There are sincere believers, there are sincere believers who still deceive, and there are the connivers at the top. The connivers at the top are really the whole reason belief-based religions keep going.

In the US, religion is the practically the only completely tax-free industry. The result has been an explosion of churches and sects.

Okay, enough of the random rant. You should get the idea.

How did I lose my faith? Or get rid of it? First, I never really fit in to begin with. In grade school, when all the other guys clamored to sign up as an altar boys, I didn't. That set me apart right there. I did participate in the choir-- and loved it. I loved the singing, even if the worship was baffling. My entire reason for not volunteering was they demanded you serve six o'clock mass, and even then I had such great difficulty just getting up for school, that I just didn't think I would be good doing anything at six. They thought I was being a heathen, but I was just being lazy.

I became a real heathen much later, but the religion was baffling to me long before then. I had years of wavering between religion and atheism, but I could never get past the truly baffling problems of the whole concept of God.

First, the Bible tells of a completely different universe. One where the earth was flat, at the center of the universe and immobile. In fact, the universe was "the world." That universe did not have any natural laws, because it was all run directly by God's power. In that world, He could stop the believably stop the sun, not only because IT was moving rather than the earth spinning, but because he did not set it up to move by automatic laws to begin with, and he would not have to contend with laws of momentum, inertia and centrifugal force.

But once I began to find out that the universe had laws, and in fact, the Biblical universe was only superficially like the real one, despite there being a purportedly all-knowing God to inform people, that created a crisis with me.

As science began to uncover laws of the universe that were very mathematical, the concept of the Deist God emerged. As the old expression goes, if you find a watch, there must be a watchmaker. Certainly, Isaac Newton believed this by what he found.

True, if what you're finding is, in fact, a watch and not superficially like a watch only due to the mental constructs you use to partially understand it. That's just a quibble though, compared to this question: why would God need a watch?

A watch is a device, a machine. Human beings set up machines specifically because we aren't all powerful, all knowing, ever present and immortal. We invent watches because otherwise, we can't keep track of time. We invented cars because we're limited by location, and we're not that fast. We invented computers because we're not that smart. We invented telescopes, because we're not all-seeing.

Now, if God is all of those, why would he have to create autonomic laws of nature? If God is capable of having the earth orbit the sun by doing it himself with his all-mighty powers, why create a law that can be detected, why not use his HAND, and let that be detected? Moreover, and this is even a stickier theological problem, if God creates a law, can he even break it? If He, then how can his word be truth?

You might get around this by saying that, of course he can break the law, but think of the implications there. It means that every law God gives is simply by His caprice and that natural law, referred to universally or in morality, simply does not exist. The Ten Commandments? All for show.

Deism was a way of saving belief in light of what science was finding by the 17th century, or rather, wasn't finding: any evidence of God. Instead, we found autonomic laws/behaviors. It created a God the Father concept far different than the petty, nasty tempered character of Yahweh in the Bible. So, it actually allowed at the time a hybrid believer/atheist, who could let God be as distant and unanswered as needed, without sparking any other nasty conflicts between believers, like the thirty-year war. It let God be both mysterious, and a matter of personal judgment.

Deism goes to show how believers adapt to allow some semblance of belief. A believer does not have to disprove atheism or even have any "evidence" of God. For some reason, be it fear of damnation, or a need for optimism, etc. a different psychological need in any believer, they want or need to believe. All they have to do is give themselves enough doubt in science or rational thought, or even motives, to assert their faith and feel honest about it, and they'll do it. Fortunately for them, but not so much for the rest of us, the Bible gives them enough canards and catch-phrases to do this. Once you become convinced that your and humankind's eternal destiny are absolutely dependent on a belief, then nothing becomes too ridiculous to uphold, preserve and spread it.

Unfortunately, one of the best ways to do this is with ignorance. Shut out or renounce any ideas or facts that may interfere with your belief and so endanger your soul. However, the damage isn't confined to individuals. Since the God in the Bible punishes whole nations, certain things like abortion, which should be a personal matter become major public issues. If a woman seeking an abortion individually, it's a matter of her sin, but the country making it legal is a matter of the nation sinning.
Therefore, believers make it everybody's business.