"Atheism isn't a belief"

"The usual way of defending atheism is wrong. The defence is not: 'I don't need a reason to accept atheism, but they need a reason to accept theism.' The deepest explanation is: atheism isn't a belief; it isn't something you accept. Atheism is [simply] the refusal to accept nonsense stories.

"It's not that atheism asserts a negative about the world; rather, it's that atheism is a negative about consciousness---i.e., about accepting something.

"Analogy: you don't need a reason not to buy a given good; you need a reason to buy it.

"The defenders of God and the arbitrary are like salesmen who say, 'You have to prove to me you shouldn't buy this.' "

~ Harry Binswanger from his post 'The burden of proof is on him who claims to know'

Statistical tests on the efficacy of prayer

"Adam Rutherford reminded me that it was the now-demonised Francis Galton who did statistical tests on the efficacy of prayer. His most famous is finding out that British Royals, who are prayed for constantly, didn’t live any longer than non-royals at a similar level of well being. Galton did related studies of the success of sea voyages accompanied by prayer versus those with no prayer. Again, no effect. And, more recently, I’ve written about the Templeton-funded study of intercessory prayer that found no effect of such prayer on the rate of recovery from cardiac surgery (in fact, those who were prayed for did marginally but not significantly worse). This constitutes direct evidence against [the] implicit thesis [of the efficacy of prayer]."

~Jerry Coyne, from his post 'Does the ubiquity of prayer prove the existence of God?'

SUNDAY SCHOOL: Penile Subsitution

 

Another one from Jesus and Mo...

“Finding Morality and Happiness Without God” [updated]

This morning's Sunday School reading comes from Onkar Ghate's article “Finding Morality and Happiness Without God”:

The basic reason religion remains such an esteemed aspect of ... society is that it is considered important, even indispensable, to morality. The strongest form this idea takes is that morality depends on religion—that without God, the distinction between good and evil loses meaning, and anything goes.
...

What most differentiates religion from philosophy, however, is how religion arrives at its answers. A philosophy seeks evidence and logical arguments for its conclusions. A religion, no matter how much theologians may argue back and forth about points of dogma, remains just that: dogma. A religion advocates its basic tenets on faith, which means in the absence of evidence and logical argument, and even in the face of counter-evidence and counter-arguments. This is why a synonym for a religion is a faith: we speak for instance interchangeably of the Jewish religion and the Jewish faith.

A religion is a worldview that espouses some version of the supernatural on faith. To claim that morality requires religion, therefore, is to claim that morality requires faith in the supernatural.
...
What makes murder wrong, then, according to religious morality, is only the fact that [a supernatural being] currently forbids the act. If He commands murder, murder becomes good. In philosophy, this is called the Divine Command theory of ethics. This—and only this—is what the distinctively religious approach to morality means.

The true champions of religious morality understand this—and to drive the point home they offer the story of [God telling Abraham to kill his son]  ... [A] s a disciple of religious morality, Abraham must not demand reasons. He must believe and act on faith—that is, in defiance of his reason. His rational mind must scream out at him—“It’s monstrous to murder my own son!”—and yet he must nevertheless obediently perform the action.
    It is far from an accident that Abraham has for centuries—in Judaism, in Christianity, and in Islam—been revered as the great exemplar of the man of faith, of the moral man, of the religious man. This is exactly what he is. He reveals the essence of what it means to accept the idea that God is the source of morality.
    For all those who accept this approach, to quote Tennyson’s haunting words: “Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.”
    Observe how incredibly non-absolutist this approach to morality is. Theists like Prager decry moral relativism and subjectivism. Moral values, they correctly say, are not determined by personal or social opinion, that is, by whim. For example, if a person thinks it’s okay to have sex with children, his opinion doesn’t make the action right. And if a society disapproves of a woman working outside the home, that doesn’t make her action wrong. But what is the religious alternative to personal or social whim?
    Supernatural whim.
...
[An] indictment of the distinctively religious approach to morality should not be read as an indictment of religious individuals. There are good people who are religious. But they are good despite the religious approach, not because of it. Authoritarianism, even in small doses, never produces positive results.
    Indeed, there exists here a tragedy. Religious ethics undermines our understanding of and dedication to a proper morality. And it does this by means of something good within us: a desire to be moral and to live up to moral principles and standards.
    There is no doubt that ... some of us are attracted to religious teachings because they offer some valuable guidance. We sense that we should comport our lives by reference, not to our internal feelings, but to external fact. When we hear a religious teacher say that we should not murder, or that we should be honest and keep our promises, or that we should live with integrity, the advice makes sense and is welcomed because there are factual reasons to live this way. In today’s non-judgmental, morally agnostic age, religion is one of the few places we can find explicit, sustained discussion of good and evil.
    But by telling us that we must accept such moral advice on faith, our desire to be moral is used against us. The result, in the field of morality, is to slowly incapacitate our rational judgment.
...
But what about those of us who still desire to be moral?
    We want moral principles that prohibit murder and require honesty and integrity because we sense that these things make sense. But religious morality places these principles into one conceptual package with genuinely irrational rules like: don’t have sex without the possibility of procreation, and love your enemy. According to religion, these all rest on the same thing, faith, and therefore we must accept all of them or none of them.
    So in the name of our desire to be moral, we close our eyes and swallow everything. To be sure, we may cheat on the more irrational of the rules. If someone deliberately injures our friend, for instance, we may demand justice, not mercy. Or, in the bedroom, we may choose to use contraception. But as a result of such cheating and to the extent we take our own moral views seriously, we will experience as a persistent feature of our lives one of the blackest of emotions: moral guilt. And we will be feeling guilty for doing what is in fact reasonable.
    Now you might wonder, why don’t more followers of religious morality try to break apart the package? Why don’t we openly accept the principles of religious morality for which we see reasons, and openly reject the ones for which we don’t? Because, we’re taught, that would be immoral.
    “Who are you to judge?”—religious teachers declare. The field of morality is not the province of reasons, evidence and arguments, it’s the province of faith. In morality, you don’t think or ask questions—like Abraham, you obey.
    The number of intelligent people who believe,... that but for a supernatural stone tablet which happens to say “Don’t murder,” there would be no reason to refrain from killing the innocent, is shocking. But this is what religious morality does to a mind. By blending the rational and the faith-based into one conceptual package, religious morality makes every moral principle a matter of faith

...
As followers of religious morality, we don’t reason about the matter, gather facts, and carefully apply a principle to decide whether aborting an embryo is murder. We simply await further orders.
There must be a better way. And fortunately, there is. 

A secular morality.

Read on to discover more, and therefore to rediscover morality.

UPDATE: Time to grow up ...

[Cartoon by Paul Kinsella. Hat tip Atheist Republic]

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Sunday School: "Take this book..."

"Take this book, it will change your life."
"Indeed, it made me an atheist."

[Hat tip Atheist Republic]
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Sunday School: Let’s look at Biblical morality

And there’s more, much more, where that came from!

As they say, if you’re a Christian who reviles misogyny, prejudice, rape child abuse and slavery then it clearly means you are not getting your morality from the Bible (and thank goodness for that). It means you’re getting the better part of your nature from somewhere much more wholesome.

So if you don’t get those ethics from that book, why on this green earth would you take any at all?

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Sunday school: Explaining so-called ‘intelligent design’

[Hat tip Atheist Republic]

#SundaySchool: Religious logic

Sunday School: Jesus & Mo on humanism v religion

 

[Cartoon by Jesus & Mo]

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Sunday School: Explaining Christianity

 

 

[Hat tip Atheist Republic]

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Sunday School: Stephen Hawking on the afterlife

 

“I regard the brain as a computer with will stop working when tis components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” ~ Stephen Hawking.

Quote of the Day: On religion & human decency

 

“Human decency is not derived from religion.
It precedes it.”
~ Christopher Hitchens, from his book God is Not Great

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Thought for a Sunday

 

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Sunday Question: “Would religions survive if …?” [updated]

 

Tweeter Atheist Republic asks a sensible question

Do you think religions would survive if instead of teaching one religion, children were taught the basics of all religions old and new?

I’d add one further point.

Do you think religions would survive if instead of teaching one religion, children were taught

• the basics of all religions and mythological systems old and new (to see their similarities and differences); and
• the secular and psychological meaning and importance of ritual (to grasp that rituals giving meaning to life and existence can just as readily be secular); and
• that religion itself is simply “an early form of philosophy” (to understand that these “first attempts to explain the universe, to give a coherent frame of reference to man’s life and a code of moral values” can be done without resort to faith)?

So, would religions survive, do you think?

And what else do you think might develop?

UPDATE: Relevant, from history’s first great female philosopher:

"Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them."
~ Hypatia, 4th Century A.D.

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Thought for a Sunday: Yahweh’s to-do list

 

[Pic by The OFFICIAL Twitter account of God]

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Thought for a Sunday

 

[Hat tip.ATHE1STP0WER/Kriz]

…

To (not) sail beyond the sunset

 

PS: A complementary chart…

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  Sunday Quote of the Day: Religion & philosophy – Ayn Rand, NOT PC

[Hat tip JMcA]

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Sunday Quote of the Day: Religion & philosophy

“Philosophy is the science that studies the fundamental aspects of the nature of existence. The task of philosophy is to provide man with a comprehensive view of life. This view serves as a base, a frame of reference, for all his actions, mental or physical, psychological or existential. This view tells him the nature of the universe with which he has to deal (metaphysics); the means by which he is to deal with it, i.e., the means of acquiring knowledge (epistemology); the standards by which he is to choose his goals and values, in regard to his own life and character (ethics)—and in regard to society (politics); the means of concretizing this view is given to him by aesthetics.
    “It is not a question of whether man chooses to be guided by a comprehensive view: he is not equipped to survive without it. The nature of his consciousness does not permit him an animal's percept-guided, range-of-the-moment form of existence. No matter how primitive his actions, he needs to project them into the future and to weigh their consequences; this requires a conceptual process, and a conceptual process cannot take place in a vacuum: it requires a context. Man's choice is not whether he needs a comprehensive view of life, but only whether his view is true or false. If it is false, it leads him to act as his own destroyer.
    “In the early stages of mankind's development, that view was provided by religion, i.e., by mystic fantasy. Man's psycho-epistemological need is the reason why even the most primitively savage tribes always clung to some form of religious belief; the mystic (i.e., anti-reality) nature of their view was the cause of mankind's incalculably long stagnation.
    “Man came into his own in Greece, some two-and-a-half thousand years ago. The birth of philosophy marked his adulthood; not the content of any particular system of philosophy, but deeper: the concept of philosophy—the realization that a comprehensive view of existence is to be reached by man's mind.
    “Philosophy is the goal toward which religion was only a helplessly blind groping. The grandeur, the reverence, the exalted purity, the austere dedication to the pursuit of truth, which are commonly associated with religion, should properly belong to the field of philosophy. Aristotle lived up to it and, in part, so did Plato, Aquinas, Spinoza—but how many others? It is earlier than we think…
    “The task of philosophy requires the total best of a mind's capacity; the responsibility is commensurate. Most men are unable to form a comprehensive view of life: some, because their ability is devoted to other professions; a great many, because they lack the ability. But all need that view and, consciously or subconsciously, directly or indirectly, they accept what philosophy offers them.”
                      ~ Ayn Rand, from "The Chicken's Homecoming" in The Anti-Industrial Revolution 
                                         [hat tip Anoop Verma]

Sunday Religious Reflection

[Pic by Godless Utopia]

Thought for a Sunday morning