On the matters of faiths, beliefs, sciences and worldviews.

This is a re-post of a story that reddit user assfly0 posted in the atheism subreddit, which I thought was so good that I wanted to share it with as many more people as possible. Enjoy!

Today was a dreary, drizzly Sunday. Wet, cold and raw, it decided. I lounged in the house, eating breakfast, completing my easy homework assignments, looking outside at the rain, wondering about a good time to get a run.

Hours went by and the rain went on, unrelenting. Unbelievable, I thought. It cannot last much longer. It can’t! I have to go running. Running is the only thing that can remedy a spell of smashed asshole syndrome (SAS), which is what I felt like.

Eventually, the rain subsided into a mere sprinkle. I figured, Ah, it’s going away. I better run for it and take my chances before it’s too late. So I put on running pants, my black hoodie, my Nikes and my mp3 player and took off in the rain.

Pretty soon, I realized it was coming down harder than I thought. Fuck! It’s too late. Can’t turn back. I’m already running, and I’m only doing four miles. About two miles in, it really starts coming down, soaking my shoes, saturating my sweatshirt heavy. God! Cock! Shiiiittt!

This makes no sense. It was raining all day and then it lets down to make it seem like it’s going to stop. Then I decide to run and when I’m too far out on my route to justify going back, it begins pouring worse than all day. What the hell? What’s your god damn problem, God? Huh? Are you enjoying this? You slimy omnipotent turd!

This is what was actually going through my mind at the time. I really and truly felt as if there were some mocking entity out there doing this to me, if for only a brief moment. For that fleeting time, Descartes’ evil prankster was doing this to me.

Thankfully, a moment later, I remembered that I don’t believe in God. I’m a semi-Christian turned agnostic turned militant atheist. After I realized this, something remarkable happened: my anger evaporated, like steam off my hot face. There was nobody doing this to me, no reason to be angry; there is only apathetic, negligent mother nature—god bless her. There is no reason to take anything personally. It wasn’t my fault or anyone else’s; there is only circumstance, like everything in this world.

It was during this time I insighted why people believe in God. They believe in him because it is so fucking easy. It is automatic. It is so natural when feeling pain or hate or any strong emotion, to attribute human qualities to anything, even when it doesn’t make sense. It feels incredibly, extraordinarily good to personify things. We see faces in everything, in clouds, blankets, even three dots—two on top, one of the bottom—can make us think of a face. Our cars, computers, or anything that requires our input, has a “personality.” In a highly emotional state, cognition is hijacked by more primitive and dominant neural pathways, which negotiate social interaction. Personification reflects this regression or crosstalk of circuitry.

Much of our nature is defined by the environmental significance of the other. Our brains in particular, have evolved so quickly and to such great heights largely to accommodate for language ability, so to better anticipate and manipulate the other. Our brains are wired to understand the other and the extent that we do this is nothing short of remarkable.

Our brains are, thus, specially configured to understand phenomena in terms of humans. Of course, then, there is a God!

written by assfly0

As previously mentioned, I recently received and read Ray Comfort’s book “You Can Lead An Atheist To Evidence, But You Can’t make Him Think“. Now, this is not so much an actual book as it is a printed FAQ, separated into loosely assembled chapters. What Comfort does is simply take comments from his blog (called “Atheist Central“) and then attempts to answers these questions or claims made by these (supposed) atheists. Pretty much every single reply ends with Ray asking the atheist to accept Jesus and have faith in God.

The first thing that struck me was the type of comments he had selected for this book. Emotional, angry responses from people who felt personally offended by his message, and repeats of old and worn “God-killer” type arguments. There are currently several people with actual scientific knowledge who regularly comment on all Comfort’s posts, whose questions would be utterly fascinating to hear him answer seriously, but those are not the questions you will see answered here. The point of this book is to evangelize, nothing more and nothing less. For someone who implies in the very title of his book that he provides atheists with “evidence” for God’s existence, this proposed evidence is suspiciously absent throughout every last chapter.

A lot of the time, I found that Comfort didn’t even actually address the question or complaint put forth by the “atheist” at all. He completely ignores it, and goes on ranting about how we already know God exists, which makes it pointless to question his existence. It’s full of creationist arguments along the lines of “since the world is a creation, that necessitates a creator” without ever even touching on the subject of how to determine that the world is a creation to begin with.

Another thing that I noticed is Comfort’s evident obsession with rapists, murderers and the mutilated corpses of little girls. Seriously, it’s quite disturbing to see the “atheist” ask a question about something, and comfort ending his reply by likening the atheist to someone who rapes, murders and mutilates little girls. It’s not just here and there either, I think he does this probably a dozen times. It really makes you wonder what this believer would be doing if he wasn’t constrained by the moral law of his God.

As an atheist myself, I like to believe that I am, in fact, quite capable of thinking. I would also welcome the opportunity to be “led to evidence”, if only that was what Comfort was trying to do with his book (Spoiler alert: it’s not). The world as a creation is, for him, all the evidence he needs to prove his creator, although he never even once attempts to prove the creation. Any question of whether God exists or not is answered with the stated claim that he does exist, without ever going into detail on how this can be known. To top it off, evolution is a big conspiracy, there are no transitional fossils and paleontologists and biologists do what they do only to become rich and famous. I wonder if Ray could even mention a single paleontologist by name.

If you’re an atheist, don’t bother reading this book. It’s rubbish. If you’re a Christian, it’s still rubbish. Ray Comfort’s arguments are as intelligent as the ocean is dry and it doesn’t matter who you are, his willful ignorance should be quite evident and obvious to anyone regardless of beliefs.

Pat Condell is a rude, condescending and mean old man. Yet he’s also bright, reasonable, rational and, most important, largely right. He has, on his website, a list of Frequently Asked “Questions” which he answers in his own, particular style.

If I were to highligt just a few of these answers, I would choose…

Q: You don’t understand Christianity/Islam.
A: I don’t understand smallpox or typhoid either, and I’m equally disinclined to get acquainted with them.

…And…

Q: Prove God doesn’t exist.
A: That’s a tough one. Show me how it’s done by proving Zeus and Apollo don’t exist, and I’ll use your method.

Not to steal any more of his website traffic, read the rest of his answers right here.

Atheist Revolution wrote a pretty good definition of what atheism is really about, what the term atheist really means, but missed out on explaining one of the most frequently misunderstood concepts of atheism: the strong atheist.

An atheist is simply an individual who do not hold the theistic belief claim (i.e., that god or gods exist)

This is all well and true, but many people seem to think that it’s the atheist making the claims and assertions that they know for a fact that God or gods don’t exist. This is especially frequent among believers, since naturally their current natural state is one of belief. That’s why when a strong atheist comes along, it might very seem like he’s actively asserting the non-existence of God or gods, which is not true. Wikipedia defines strong atheists like this:

An explicit atheist has made an assertion regarding belief in gods; such an individual may eschew belief in gods (weak atheism), or affirm that gods do not exist (strong atheism).

Hmm, that doesn’t sound right… It seems strong atheists do actually affirm that gods do not exist. But how can we possibly do that, without being believers ourselves? Let’s take another look at the Atheist Revolution article.

In Atheism: The Case Against God, George Smith argues that such a definition reminds us that the burden of proof lies with the theist because this is the person making the belief claim. When the theist says, “God exists,” we are correct to expect evidence in support of this claim. Without such evidence, the claim cannot be accepted on rational grounds. The atheist is saying, “I don’t accept this claim,” and this rejection requires no evidence precisely because it is the default position where no positive assertion is being made.

This is crucial to the understanding of the atheist position. A weak atheist may look at the claim for God or gods, and say ‘this is not good enough’, but a strong atheist might add ‘and the evidence for a natural explanation far outweigh the evidence provided for the existence of God or gods, thus tipping the favor against their existence’. This is the strong atheist position. It is not one of belief, but of more certain disbelief. A strong atheist not only rejects the theist position due to lack of evidence, but favors the atheist position due to the existence of evidence for a natural explanation.

This is not about faith, nor belief, but only about the evidence. A person who claims that atheists have as much ‘blind faith’ as believers have not understood the atheist position at all.