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Martin! I read your statement on September 11 and realize I wasted my time sharing my views with you. I definately know you stereotype individuals with beliefs because you did it again in this write up. The past exchanges were only a good test to see how defensive you can be. Or how right you are? I'm interested in discovery-not being right although I have to admit in this case your style and objectivity is very questionable. Opinions are shaped on what you are exposed to and how you interpret the data available and unavailable. You seem to have a limited view of the facts of Sept 11 or misinterpret the cause or change it to fit your own agenda. Very common practice of the media sometimes also. Hint: Osama is mentally ill and is a lunatic who> sympathizes with Palestine over a land war. Pretty well known by now. By the way- I believe both sides of that conflict are wrong in their methods and reasons of war. ISRAEL and PALESTINE. — not that it matters much to you maybe. They don't like each other because of ignorance and intolerance and revenge. If thats not evil then what is? They could chose to do otherwise but won't. Same as any racist! What's NEW? His own family disowned him! Has nothing to do with GOD at all! He's a pathetic loser and coward and criminal. END OF STORY! The world will never be the same again. In one way the world is now a significantly better place. Your words!!! Ask the victims families — What an idiotic statement. Life is precious-the talents and energies of around 3000 people were lost. Some pretty off base opinions here Martin. Including the physical structures and nightmares that people will have for years. Oh yes, nightmares aren't real either since you can't explain them with evolution. They just are! Have you asked any monkeys about there banana dreams recently? Question: What did the incredible complex single cell evolve from? Or DNA? The pattern (hint pattern means DESIGN) ask an architect or graphic designer! No atheist I have ever had a discussion with has EVER answered this question. I am changing my mind on my view of your objectivity and viewpoint of life. I don't know if you just have an agenda or are just rebellious or egotistical. I think the reason you get some negative replies to your website is that you discount other people's sensitivities to issues like this. Even including beliefs. Nobody will ever be able to expect the passengers of an airliner to behave like sheep. Who said they were SHEEP? Are you reading tabloids? You have no clue of the passenger mentality or makeup since you weren't there. This is a completely moronic statement. I thought you used reason and logic. This group included every religion and race crosssection known including atheists. The agenda of the terrorists was political with a weak finger pointing and bastardization of a religion to point at like you do! You choose to blame everything on religion! That's totally weak and just as off base as the fanatical and radical ISLAM Jihad fighters. Faced with the prospect of dying for somebody's cause, of dying in their seats, they preferred to die on their feet. I bet not one of the passengers knew the motives or group the hijackers were part of other than causing destruction. Or do you think they held a press conference on the planes? They were seat belted most likely! And only one of the planes had advanced notice of the situation unfolding! The tide of terror has now turned. The public of the free world will not dumbly take on the role of sacrificial victims for anybody's god or ideology. They didn't before either. Hitler claimed he was a Christian and WASN'T. YOU are easily lead to blame GOD. WAKE UP and think for yourself. There are causes I would be prepared to die for, somebody else's god is not one of them. Anybody's god is not one of them. The calls to prayer are nauseating. You have no clue what prayer is! It's focusing and asking for help. Since you don't believe anything you would never understand. It is ideology and theology that are causing all the problems with the world, continuing the suffering and the dying because people claim that the big problems of the world are for only God to solve. Well God does not seem to be good at solving them unaided. Like I said- GOD is part of US. We were created in His image. You've missed the point again. GOD lives in us and we can decide to CONNECT or do what you do - REJECT I see no evidence of any divine solution to global hunger, natural disasters, overpopulation, over-consumption, selfish greed and human hatred. Look in the mirror!! These are all real problems that billions of prayers seems powerless to solve, I think for the obvious reason that there is nothing to hear the prayers or at the very least nothing capable of changing circumstances to suit our wishes. What are you doing about it? God helps those who help themselves. Who said this stupid cliche??? Some off base role model of yours? The best way to answer a prayer is to stop wasting your time hoping PRAYER IS ACTION - NOT HOPING - It's not mystical, it's part of US. You're right here, we DO have a responsibility to BEHAVE kindly and make a difference which is why I would never choose to be atheist ATHEIST=APATHY. Action speaks louder than prayer. A PRAYER is a business plan or objective. I pray for focus and energy and I receive it. Same as concentrating. Thats what Prayer is ALSO. The only way to solve the problems of the world we live in is to set aside the issue of god and the supernatural and to get down to fixing the problems ourselves. Get BUSY. CHRISTIANS have been doing it for years! It has been said before but nothing will be lost by saying it again; imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try, no hell below us above us only sky. And the point is? That lyric is a cop out! No responsibility implied. Like saying flowers and butterflies will make everything OK. I agree with you that it takes effort. I don't see your group collecting help for the needy or building shelters. Where are the atheist hospitals? It does not matter what you believe about the shape or history of the universe, what matters is the directions we take today. People have always said that god will find a way or works in mysterious ways. If god wants to work through this atheist he is welcome to do it, I just want to create a better, more peaceful world with a secure future for all our people. It strikes me as a much healthier and moral way to act than to put the love of a nebulous chameleon spirit above that of the flesh and blood people we share a planet with. You've completely missed the point again! GOD is part of us! Vengeance is a sin - I thought you didn't believe in SIN! By reacting to terrorism with repression we play into the hands of those terrorists. They did not carry out these acts of terror without a thought to the consequences. They had no clue who they were dealing with. STILL DON't!!! They are in Cuban prisons now. They must have thought about the consequences and this did not deter them, it may even have encouraged them. This was not an attack on the USA, it was an attack on freedom and democracy. There is no doubt that these were acts of war. They were acts of war on a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and therefore they were acts of war against my country also. We do have the authority to treat these acts as acts of war and to use appropriate military measures. However that does not mean that we should. It is vitally important that America stays on the moral high ground. Only a few fanatics see the events of this week as anything other than horrific, obscene, criminal and profoundly wicked. To go over the top would be deeply counter productive. Military measures should be tightly focussed to specific and achievable goals taking all possible measures to minimize collateral damage. If a few dozen civilians get killed then the world could accept that, but world opinion would not countenance massive casualties. It is better to wait five years and nail the culprits than to act quickly and kill innocent people in a premature show of strength. If George W Bush and Colin Powell keep their heads and respond to this outrage intelligently the world could be a safer place for freedom. If they fall into the all to easy mode of bombing easy targets in hot blooded revenge then the world may be entering a new era of terror and barbarism on an unprecedented scale. The stakes have never been higher. Never before has so much leadership skill and judgment been required of a man with so little obvious talent for it. We can only hope that he receives good advice and is not presented with any dangerous options. Don't think you will pull the blinders off nor am I trying to change your mind. BUT even your view of Bush is probably very uninformed or biased based upon who you hang around. He has done a very good job and has a high approval rating here! Todd :) |
I am sorry if it is a little hard to follow, Todd writes like that, I have improved the flow and grammar quite a bit from the original, deleting lots of multiple punctuation marks and converting them into the correct format.
“The world will never be the same again. In one way the world is now a significantly better place. Nobody will ever be able to expect the passengers of an airliner to behave like sheep. Faced with the prospect of dying for somebody's cause, of dying in their seats, they preferred to die on their feet.”
How can you misconstrue that as severely as you did? It beggars the imagination. I was not saying that the terrorism improved things, I am saying that the response of the heroes on that flight that crashed in Pennsylvania changed things, for the better. Showing the world that civilian is not a synonym of passive victim.
The people who died on the first three flights did not know they were going to be used as ballast in flying bombs, on flight 93 they did, as they were told of the earlier incidents in New York when they telephoned their families, as instructed, to say goodbye, and so they had the incentive to resist even if it would cost them their lives. They knew they had nothing to lose by fighting, and they had some chance to save their own lives as well.
They responded in a perfectly rational way, a way that does not require exceptional faith or courage, just a clear understanding of the situation and their duty. Doing the right thing does not need special other-worldly courage, but we who witness such acts also owe a duty to recognize and praise it, which I have done. Such courage is of the same type as is shown by cancer victims and children dying of incurable diseases, we see it as exceptional but in reality it is simply the normal human reaction to a situation nobody ought to face. Putting such courage down to faith, special racial or cultural heritage or anything else is devaluing it. Such courage is human courage, the courage to fight for the lives of your loved ones is built into all men, fortunately in a civilized society few men need to prove it.
I am amazed that you seem to be the first person to have misread this in that way and yet you claim to be bright. I get all sorts coming to my site, of all persuasions and intellectual levels and yet you are the first person to read that piece in such a way. Whilst it would be wrong to jump to a conclusion on the basis of such little evidence I am tempted to draw the conclusion that you have some kind of mental block or inadequacy of some kind.
Osama bin Laden is a dangerous man filled with hatred and a belief system that can readily be bent to hatred. Belief in one God and an afterlife does not make him a better person, it arms him and makes him more dangerous. Religious belief does not cause hatred but it can arm hatred with suicidal zealots, as it has done hundreds of times before. The terrorists of al Qaeda, the crusaders, the warriors of the Great Plains, the Vikings and the samurai all were fearsome fighters made more potent by their beliefs in the rightness of their cause and the certainty of a glorious welcome the other side of death.
Belief in God or Allah or any other faith is not a recipe for good or evil behaviour. Powerful and strong religions have grown up strong because they have enough ambiguity to allow many people to find different things within them. Socialists, homosexuals, racists, bigots, nationalists, pacifists, vegetarians, beef barons, slave owners, abolitionists, fascists and liberals can all find a comfortable home within Christianity. Islam too allows many interpretations, it is also a broad church.
The faith in any god can be used as ammunition in any fight, from the noblest endeavours our species has ever undertaken with the lives of men like Martin Luther King to the foulest acts of depravity and persecution. Pogroms, crusades and holocausts have all been done by men of the strongest faith. Faith is a powerful tool and a powerful weapon. My contention is that good can still happen without faith, but the vilest evils cannot, and so faith is best put aside.
Faith has never moved a single mountain, but it has destroyed billions of lives. Wars have been made possible by faith, or made worse by it. A man not afraid to die is willing to fight in a way no rational man can. It is entirely rational to stay with your platoon and fight right up to the moment when your own personal death is certain, and no further, it is still logical to keep fighting even against huge odds as long as there is a chance of survival. In modern warfare the time at which death becomes certain rather than just probable it is usually too late to back out anyway, so allowing atheists into the armed forces is not the tactical blunder it might have been in the past. But for a man of faith that equation is changed, defection or desertion are unthinkable and certain death is not a problem. The man of faith will leap over the top to death and glory, or dive his aircraft into a building with the utter certainty of his place in paradise.
Faith is a powerful form of belief that will override other ideas, including self preservation, that is why it is so dangerous. Only those who want to spread their own beliefs call faith a virtue.
Prayer is not action. At best it is concentration or meditation. I can see how it could help in focussing the mind. I have found the best way to understand something is to attempt to teach it. Perhaps something of this focussing and concentration effect can explain how prayer can be a help in some circumstances. However when it is dressed as a prayer to a God that a large part of the community does not believe in then the prayer has no value as those who do not have that faith cannot share it. We need a wider, secular form of prayer. We need to develop ways for all to join in. Whenever a prayer is offered to God the atheists in the group will feel excluded. In my country politicians feel they cannot ask the community to pray because they know that prayer does not unite the people, it divides them. Tony Blair is very good at uniting the people, he does not ask people to pray although it is well known that he is a very sincere Christian.
In a nation that has a large proportion of atheists and many non-Christian religions God has no part to play in uniting the people. This is quite ironic considering that there is an established state church, the head of state is the head of the church and religious education is compulsory in all schools. It is your country that has maintained religion more than any other civilized country. It is your country that tries to unite through God and it is your country that finds faith and church going to be an asset in a politician and mine that it can be a liability.
You say that Hitler claimed to be a Christian but wasn't. Who are you to judge the contents of a man's heart? Isn't that God's job in your creed? Or is your definition of Christianity infinitely malleable to suit any circumstances? Quite like your book of absolute contradictions.
You claim that pattern means design. That is a very sweeping generalization and quite impossible for me to disprove as you claim God has designed everything, so any evidence of pattern in nature I could offer up as proof that pattern can emerge without design you can dismiss as proving nothing but the foresight and majesty of your designer God. Your belief system is full of such convenient protection against disproof, which is hardly surprising because it has survived for seventy odd generations of challenge, if it was not self-proving it would not have survived. You see the survival of your religion as proof of its rightness, I see it as proof of its ability to survive.
How do you account for the survival of "wrong" religions? Then once you have explained the survival of wrong religions explain how you know your religion is not a wrong religion and how it differs, and how that can be explained to the person who has utter (virtuous?) faith in his wrong religion and the self evident fact (as he sees it) that yours is the wrong religion.
You have some book with massive gaps in it to explain everything. Any things it seems to explain badly or inconsistently you can find ways to forgive. In contrast you expect the enemy of your faith, reason and science, to have perfect explanations. For you mysteries are part of the charm of your religion and yet you seem to consider anything unexplained in the alternative explanation as being a fatal weakness. You don't need to explain why God created evil or who made God or how a perfect void could contain an entity with perfect wisdom without any experience or why Jesus told his disciples to expect the second coming in their lifetime but we need to explain every detail of evolution and the Big Bang with no wiggle room allowed.
I am not going to rise to your churlish challenges to explain exactly how DNA works or cells evolved, the answer is that nobody knows, but we are working on it. Science will have a better explanation soon. Religion never will.
Once again you failed to understand, or succeeded in misunderstanding, the significance of the quote from Imagine. I was suggesting that religion be put on one side rather than abandoned. I am too much of a pessimist to expect religion to fade away, however it might be possible to allow people to come together in some way that does not rely on them sharing a religious belief. It would not be necessary for anybody to believe that there was no heaven, only to imagine it and act accordingly. If all people put aside their differing beliefs and instead concentrated on their common interests it might be possible to live in peace and harmony. Such peace will never be possible as long as some people hold fundamentalist views about gods and claim that their belief in such gods in the form of faith is the supreme virtue in their lives and that this belief must be lived out in every action they take.
We are all equal, we all have an equal capacity to act in accordance with faith, if by some genuine miracle it could be engineered that faith was never misplaced or abused then faith would indeed be a virtue, but in this world faith is a trick of the mind that can be used to justify any idea that can hold a man's attention for long enough to become imprinted with some form of legitimacy. Once a man has faith he knows he is right and he knows his faith is right. Every other idea he has goes through this idea, faith acts like a boot sector virus, every single idea in a man's head gets tagged by it and linked through it. Faith is good, doubt is bad, or evil, or possession by evil spirits, doubt is utterly wrong because faith is a virtue. That cycle of ideas can go through a believers head ten times per second, by practice and repetition it becomes burned into the synapses of the brain. The man can become thoroughly taken over by faith (which is good, which is a virtue, to doubt it is sin) and the idea of faith becomes central to every conscious thought. Christianity is not a belief, it is a faith. It requires no proof (proof implies doubt, doubt is a sin, faith is a virtue) it needs no evidence to support it.
Faith makes people happy and fulfilled. People can be content and fulfilled by any faith, and history is full of examples of weird and wonderful beliefs that have been supported by faith, beliefs that have helped people to be happy and fulfilled, beliefs that require no proof, beliefs that cannot be doubted. Some of these have died out and we feel free to mock them. Others linger on and are protected by the tit-for-tat rule of you don't make fun of my faith and I won't make fun of yours.
The only way the world can be at peace is either for all to have the same religion or for all to accept that they will not have the same religion. As long as some people will not accept others having different beliefs there will be constant conflict. Osama bin Laden and his ilk want to unite the world under the true faith. So do hundreds of other religious and politico-religious leaders. The only drawback is that each is equally fanatically committed to mutually antagonistic one true faiths in different one true gods. Each faith is a true faith, equally blind to reason, equally empowered by the idea that their pig headed dogmatism is the highest form of human virtue. They each constantly remind each other that it is their faith that is the key, any setback means they should have greater faith, pray harder, doubt less.
As long as people believe this central dogma that faith is the ultimate virtue they will continue to gleefully murder each other in the name of their loving god.
Faith is not a virtue.
Believe whatever you want to believe, whatever you have to believe but please understand that faith is not a virtue. It is a weapon. It turns well intentioned people into instruments of evil. Just please think about this matter clearly for once in your life. Faith allows a person to believe anything and make that belief central to their life to the exclusion of everything else. Faith destroys morality. If your idea of ultimate good, your God, tells you to do something unspeakably hideous you can call upon faith to allow you to do it. That idea can go against any other idea in your head because it uses the tricks of ultimate good and faith. That way of thinking can allow you to do anything.
Faith is good, God is good, God tells me to cut my head off with a chainsaw, doubt is evil, faith is good, pain is weakness, doubt is temptation from Satan, faith is the highest expression of my value as a person.
Can't you see how bloody dangerous that single line of code "faith is a virtue" can be? It can allow people to be used by ideas and become tools of them, and willing tools, rejoicing in the honour of being asked to test their faith!
Your Bible is full of this stuff. Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son and he is made out to be a huge hero for it. Thomas shows a very reasonable degree of scientific scepticism and is branded as weak. Saints and martyrs proved their faith was more important to them than their own life, and instead of being seen as sick and dangerous deviants they are held up as the perfect role model. This is going on in Palestine to this day, little boys look at photographs of their martyred brothers and long for the opportunity to join them in paradise.
Faith is the key meme that holds religions together. Faith is what defines religions. The single most powerful virus ever generated. The greatest single cause of evil the world has ever known.
Faith cannot be reconciled with a different faith. It is a sick joke to try to unite people with different ultimate beliefs in a fundamentally different exclusive ultimate reality while simultaneously allowing them to retain faith.
I hope you can try to understand what I have been saying here, but I doubt your brain will allow it. As long as you hold that faith is a virtue your prison cell is complete, you are stuck in that frame of reference and every idea you have must first be checked against this central dogma.
If something undermines my faith it is evil, if it reinforces it that thing is good.
Doubt hurts, it causes distress, but FAITH KILLS. It has done for millennia.
Wars are a constant fact of life in our species. On the small scale of the tribal band they make perfect evolutionary sense. Wars are fought for women. Just as the only other intelligent animals on this planet, chimpanzees and dolphins, warfare is conducted by alliances of males to secure females. That is how warfare developed. An inevitable price to pay for intelligence and cunning. If you have a brain capable of social interaction, sufficient memory of individuals and the capacity to see your interests and imagine the actions of others then your species will develop war, if you have a sex structure in your population that has reproductive success limited essentially by the numbers of one of the sexes then the other sex will band together to acquire more members of the more valuable sex. Banding together to fight for females makes perfect sense, so the skills of warfare must develop in any species that has intelligence and a reproductive system that is limited by the relative scarcity of one sex.
Where we differ from chimpanzees and dolphins, who have both been observed to form male alliances and start wars, is in the degree to which we can think abstractly. Only we have the power to develop more complicated concepts such as duty and faith. It is these ideas that turn our innate capacity to fight in male dominated war parties into the phenomena we know as war, crusade, Jihad, terrorism and pogrom. Such ideas are inevitable. They do not need a Satan or a God to spread them. They are ideas that are reinvented all the time and they have been found in every culture anthropologists have ever encountered. Perhaps they are inevitable from the structure of our brains, perhaps they are simply inevitable in the way the ratio of the radius to the circumference of a circle simply must be, if you develop a brain capable of logic, memory, grammar, love, care, respect then honour, duty and faith will inevitably occur sometime along the way. Because of the catch 22 nature of the concept of faith it only needs to be invented once, because its reproductive future is inevitable.
Faith is its own reward. Faith makes the faithful feel better for having it, and makes them feel better for noticing that they feel better for having it, and it makes them feel better for telling others that they feel better for having it and it makes them feel supremely happy when they can convince other people to share this idea with them, not just happy, but a special guilt free form of happiness.
Faith isn't heroin, it isn't even sugar coated heroin with a cherry on top, it is sugar coated heroin with a cherry on top that makes you feel better for being happy to take it and it makes you feel guilty for not sharing it with others, but don't worry, it's free! You can give it away and you don't have less of it, you actually have more, and it now tastes even sweeter! And you feel so much better for sharing, and that feeling is guilt free too... etc. etc.
Faith is so very powerful that it should be kept out of reach of people. Making heroin illegal has done nothing to make it less popular, so I don't suggest making faith illegal, but I do suggest that faith is treated as being far too dangerous an idea to be allowed to be unchecked. Can you imagine the outcry if the state was encouraging children to take heroin?
Faith is such a simple idea that it has been invented over and over again in different cultures and is constantly reinvented. Faith was used by Nazis and Communists and has fuelled personal crusades, careers and obsessions.
If there was one single idea I could purge from the repertoire of humanity it would not be Jesus, God or racism, it would be the idea that faith can be a virtue.