I wish theists would use the “fine-tuning” argument for the existence of god more often. This is not, as some of you might assume, because it is the most easily dispatched of arguments. It is instead because analysis of the fine-tuning argument requires examination of some very cool aspects of physics and cosmology. There are few theist arguments that delve directly into the more interesting aspects of reality. Many theist arguments turn their back on reality, and then start running.
My least favorite theist arguments orbit around scripture. The most honest approach to scriptural arguments is a resounding: “I do not recognize the authority of scripture, and the accuracy of scripture is usually suspect too”. I find this too dismissive in one-on-one conversations, so I am left pussy-footing around the informational vacuity of scriptural references. I court the blatantly dishonest impression that scriptures provide reasonable information.
My least favorite argument that masquerades as a GOD (GOD is the recursive acronym “God Ontology Debate”) often starts with a statement of the type: “I know god exists because I feel him, he speaks to me, and I see him in my dreams”. Engaging this argument is more an exploration of deviant psychology than actual conversation. This exploration is probably best left to medical professionals who have been trained not to bust out a statement like: “how many children has he fathered with you? I understand he does that from time-to-time”. This statement almost never goes over well, especially when the recipient is male and you reply that “all things are possible with god” when they point this fact out.
I am not alone in my preference for the fine-tuning argument. Richard Dawkins called it "The most interesting argument he had so far heard or encountered".
In addition to talking about cool stuff, which is always time well spent, the fine tuning argument tend to suggest a more deist god than most arguments. It certainly discards young earth creationism.
The status of the great physical constants allows for the condensation of matter after the big bang. It has been suggestively proposed that slight deviations from the current values of the physical constants would have matter spreading out homogeneously, or some other sort of progression which would lead to something that would not give rise to us. The basis of the argument is that fine tuning implies a fine tuner; we are here so the universe was fine tuned.
We are here able to talk about the physical constants. Therefore the physical constants were fine tuned for us to be here. If we were not here because the physical constants were incompatible with our existence then you might be able to say god did not exist, but you couldn’t say that because you would not exist.
This is such a tiny circle of logic it is amazing to believe it could encompass anything. God created the universe, therefore the universe is fine-tuned; the universe is fine-tuned, therefore god created it.
The precision of the argument demands precision in the physical constants. The more leeway there exists in what the constants could be the less impressive the argument is. God must be a really fine tuner to be implicated by the tuning.
If I were to look at a random thing that can be precisely measured its specifications would not necessarily make for a convincing argument for the existence of god. If I looked at a new bicycle, and remarked that it weighed in at 15.172 pounds, it would not make a good argument for the existence of god. The bicycle could weigh in at 15.173 pounds, or 15.170 pounds; who cares (except the obsessive rider)? The precision needed for the physical constants is no mere “if things were different they would not be the same” type statement. It must follow that we would not exist if there were minor perturbations in the identified tuned situation. It is hard to picture the universe, and life in particular, depending on the specific characteristics of most measurable things in it.
The half-dozen or so physical constants typically identified by the fine-tuning debaters are intrinsic not only to the status of the universe, but to the narrative of how the universe became what it is today. If we have a different narrative the physical constants could be quite different.
If the universe was created exactly as it is now certain of the physical constants would not need to be the way they are. If stars did not need to condense out of nebula the cosmological constant (lambda) could be quite different. Certainly if the world was made with all the galaxies and planets separated by close to their current separation distances the relative importance of gravity and expansion energy in the universe (Omega) could be vastly different. The fact is that the more post big-bang meddling attributed to god there is the less fine-tuning of the physical constants is needed to make the world a place where we are.
If god simply lit the fuse on the big bang and ran off why is religion important? What is prayer? What good does it do to believe in god? The fine-tuning argument at best leads to an impotent deist god. This is the last residue of god left in the mind of the soon-to-be Adult Onset Atheist.
The fine-tuning argument implies that there is no afterlife, that prayers are not answered, that scripture is fantasy, and that most aspects of theism are delusional. The idea of a fine tuner requires the existence of a vastly superior intelligence that acts like it is no intelligence at all. Why propose the fine tuner? What actionable purpose does this philosophical construct serve?
I discard the notion of a fine-tuner god because he is useless.
Showing posts with label OUT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OUT. Show all posts
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Saturday, January 1, 2011
HNY
2011 invites a new decade-like time-span into history. It will be called the “twenty-teens” even though it will not really be "teens" for another two years. Because history requires punctuation as much as English composition there will be an apparent pause in events as 2011 begins.
Some historians will refer to the proper decade as the “twenty-tens”. They will do this because of a misguided desire to cover all of the 21st century in similar-sounding precisely-defined increments of time. They will do this because they are insufferable dweebs.
By calling the time-span from 2011-2019 the twenty-teens one gleans the delicate fruit of psychological allusion.
That is, of course, if we make it to the actual twenty teens. I allude to the “End of the World” which is supposed to take place on December 21st 2012. I love it when the world ends; I got way too much enjoyment out of Y2K. I have a special project I am working on to mark the last days. It will involve my penchant for snide historical commentary, and I will reveal what it is just before December 21st of this year.
This past year I was wildly successful with all of my characteristically feeble New-Years-Resolutions. I planned on posting at least once-a-month to this blog, and instead I posted over a hundred times. I resolved to write a poem and read it to an audience of strangers, and I wrote several and read four. It is true that my audience consisted of only three people so my hand-waving beat-poet-at-the-lectern image of myself dissolved in a puff of disillusionment, but the audience made up for their small numbers in their crowded strangerness.
For this next year I’ve decided to bring in more readers to this blog. I've become part of "The Atheist Blogroll" and "Planet Atheism". You can see both the Atheist Blogroll and Planet Atheism badges in my sidebar. The Atheist Blogroll is like any other topical blogroll; basically a list of topically-related blogs. Planet Atheist is a aggregator blog which publishes topically-related feeds from a number of blogs; this makes it a convenient place to read a bunch of atheist blogs at once.
The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.
If you would like to join Planet Atheism you can find more information on how to do that by clicking on the Planet Atheism badge in the sidebar.
The blog has been very successful in bringing in readers this past year. Thousands of people have read this blog, not counting some who get it on direct feed. They have clicked in from every continent, and every state of the union (except Iowa).
Readership stokes more than just my ego. When people click on the automatically-generated advertisements on the side panel I make money. This year I made more than a dollar and seventy-five cents. I am going to blow the entire wad of cash as a partial sponsor of a racer in the 2011 Los Angeles marathon. I should be able to buy him at least two gels with the money (to be consumed at mile 7 and 14). If I can find a sharpie on March 20th he will be sporting “Adult Onset Atheist (adultonsetatheist.blogspot.com)” somewhere on his running outfit.
Ego-stroking was accomplished in spades by another project which I will cryptically call “PTIP”. A collateral yield of PTIP was the contacting of a couple dozen folks I had not seen in decades. I was reminded again and again how very awesome people can be. Sometimes it is easy to get a distorted picture of the Human species when looking at it as an amalgam. Time had worn down some of the people to shiny stubs which sparkled in amazing intensity when they even mentioned the people they loved. Some had diffused into the very structure of their surroundings; when they smiled everything around them smiled just as brightly. Some had risen through adversities so sublime they empathized with unique authority. With some I discovered strange new friendships and converse with them regularly about profound interests. Only one retreated into a passive aggressive cave with a sign reading “I did not even return his last e-mails” nailed above its gaping mouth. Most filtered through our brief time together, and left an amazingly optimistic sweetness in their wake.
I feel like the year called twenty-ten left an optimistic sweetness in its wake. I can’t add up some score value, and say it was a positive year on average. I can’t look at an emotional tide-chart, and say it has ended on a high note. I can say that I cared about some people in 2010, and it feels very likely that I will do so even more in the future. I can say that I loved some people in 2010, and it feels more than likely that I will do so even more in the twenty-teens.
Some historians will refer to the proper decade as the “twenty-tens”. They will do this because of a misguided desire to cover all of the 21st century in similar-sounding precisely-defined increments of time. They will do this because they are insufferable dweebs.
By calling the time-span from 2011-2019 the twenty-teens one gleans the delicate fruit of psychological allusion.
“The twenty-teens behaved like its eponymous ill-mannered child”. “The twenty-teen neo-cons became the teen-mom to the teabagger love-child that someone else would have to raise”. “The developed world’s twenty-teenage experimentation with geo-engineering became an addiction whose grip proved almost impossible to break”.Much will appear to happen in the next nine years simply because it will be cool to blame it on the twenty-teenage years.
That is, of course, if we make it to the actual twenty teens. I allude to the “End of the World” which is supposed to take place on December 21st 2012. I love it when the world ends; I got way too much enjoyment out of Y2K. I have a special project I am working on to mark the last days. It will involve my penchant for snide historical commentary, and I will reveal what it is just before December 21st of this year.
This past year I was wildly successful with all of my characteristically feeble New-Years-Resolutions. I planned on posting at least once-a-month to this blog, and instead I posted over a hundred times. I resolved to write a poem and read it to an audience of strangers, and I wrote several and read four. It is true that my audience consisted of only three people so my hand-waving beat-poet-at-the-lectern image of myself dissolved in a puff of disillusionment, but the audience made up for their small numbers in their crowded strangerness.
For this next year I’ve decided to bring in more readers to this blog. I've become part of "The Atheist Blogroll" and "Planet Atheism". You can see both the Atheist Blogroll and Planet Atheism badges in my sidebar. The Atheist Blogroll is like any other topical blogroll; basically a list of topically-related blogs. Planet Atheist is a aggregator blog which publishes topically-related feeds from a number of blogs; this makes it a convenient place to read a bunch of atheist blogs at once.
The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.
If you would like to join Planet Atheism you can find more information on how to do that by clicking on the Planet Atheism badge in the sidebar.
The blog has been very successful in bringing in readers this past year. Thousands of people have read this blog, not counting some who get it on direct feed. They have clicked in from every continent, and every state of the union (except Iowa).
Readership stokes more than just my ego. When people click on the automatically-generated advertisements on the side panel I make money. This year I made more than a dollar and seventy-five cents. I am going to blow the entire wad of cash as a partial sponsor of a racer in the 2011 Los Angeles marathon. I should be able to buy him at least two gels with the money (to be consumed at mile 7 and 14). If I can find a sharpie on March 20th he will be sporting “Adult Onset Atheist (adultonsetatheist.blogspot.com)” somewhere on his running outfit.
Ego-stroking was accomplished in spades by another project which I will cryptically call “PTIP”. A collateral yield of PTIP was the contacting of a couple dozen folks I had not seen in decades. I was reminded again and again how very awesome people can be. Sometimes it is easy to get a distorted picture of the Human species when looking at it as an amalgam. Time had worn down some of the people to shiny stubs which sparkled in amazing intensity when they even mentioned the people they loved. Some had diffused into the very structure of their surroundings; when they smiled everything around them smiled just as brightly. Some had risen through adversities so sublime they empathized with unique authority. With some I discovered strange new friendships and converse with them regularly about profound interests. Only one retreated into a passive aggressive cave with a sign reading “I did not even return his last e-mails” nailed above its gaping mouth. Most filtered through our brief time together, and left an amazingly optimistic sweetness in their wake.
I feel like the year called twenty-ten left an optimistic sweetness in its wake. I can’t add up some score value, and say it was a positive year on average. I can’t look at an emotional tide-chart, and say it has ended on a high note. I can say that I cared about some people in 2010, and it feels very likely that I will do so even more in the future. I can say that I loved some people in 2010, and it feels more than likely that I will do so even more in the twenty-teens.
Friday, January 8, 2010
Evangelical atheist
I like the idea of an “evangelical atheist”. There is worthy irony in using evangelical in this context.
I use the latest definition of evangelical which is: “marked by militant or crusading zeal”. However, it is impossible to use the word without traces of its origin clinging to it like a odor. The original Evangelical churches (In the early part of the last century) were, along with some Lutheran churches, part of the Landeskirchen (state run churches) in Germany. The Evangelical churches lobbied unsuccessfully to be the official church for the National Socialists in the early 1930s. It was partially due to the zeal of that sales attempt that the term evangelical was resurrected in the 1970's as a descriptor that some conservative Christians began using to distinguish themselves from Fundamentalists. The definition I use comes from describing zeal as being like that of members of the evangelical groups that arose in the 1970s.
The god of the evangelical Christian churches is very interventionist. Want a truly awkward god? The evangelical Christian churches have one for you.
In addition to an interventionist god the evangelicals believe in being quite interventionist themselves. The evangelical wants to convert you to their belief. Since I have said I like the idea of being an evangelical atheist does this mean I want you to be an atheist? Yes it does actually.
Why do I care if you are an atheist? I care because I think you can use the tools of reason to make a happier life for yourself. Just as with suffering there is no shortage of potential happiness. Why don't you pick up a little more happiness for yourself?
Since I have gone to the trouble of usurping a definition I think it only proper that I steal a few other things.
David Bebbington has deffined a “quadrilateral of priorities that is the basis of Evangelicalism”which he says are:
conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism
I plan on stealing all of the useful bits from this quadrilateral of made up words.
Firstly I should point out that I use the term quadrilateral in the disjointedly stilted way that Bebbington does. It looks to me like he stole the word from the Wesleyans who used the term to define an approach to their religious method (they are often called methodists). The Wesleyan quadrilateral is scripture, tradition, experience and reason. Why the Wesleyans took a name for a four-sided polygon to desribe their set of principles is beyond me. Why Bebbington would steal the poorly thought out Wesleyan term to describe his set of concepts is even more strange. Did anyone stop and think “does this make sense”. Perhaps they did and arrived at the same conclusion I did. The conclusion that it does not make sense and is therefore more humorous to use.
As mentioned earlier the idea of Conversionism helps make the term evangelical worth taking in the first place. I want YOU to join in the new atheist movement.
Activism is pretty self explanatory. Get active, write down what the new atheism means to you and share it. Let your representatives know that you are an atheist and you vote. Let people know that atheists are people with faces and not evil forces plotting to destroy humanity.
Biblicism sounds made up, and probably is. The idea that perfect knowledge comes from the bible is difficult to adapt directly to an atheist “quadrilateral of priorities”. I will adroitly sidestep this problem by simply spelling this wrong and giving it a new meaning. “Biblioism” is also a made up word but it looks similar and and since it doesn't look like it has officially been invented before I can define it. I define it to mean “Leveraging the property of human knowledge wherein every human idea can be written down so that others can read and understand it”. This is obviously an important concept. It means that people can comprehensively communicate everything they think with one another in a archival format and that there is a now named pursuit of accomplishing just that. There are many facets to this activity. This is an ambitious enterprise worthy of being one of the four elements of the quadrilateral of an evangelical movement.
Crucicentism is also a made up word. It means that mutilation of somebody centuries ago is important to you after you die. All the elements of this concept are difficult to examine. As an atheist I find the concept described by this word as vapid as it is ephemeral. We need a better word, and a better more substantial concept. I propose the word “Amorism”. This is a word with at least a century of re-deffinition behind it. I think it is time to define it again. I define it as “Loving and finding ways and means to love more”. I have obviously saved the best concept of my evangelical Atheist quadrilateral for last. We are more than just atheists, we are human atheists. We want you to be part of our world because we love you and shedding the vestiges of guilt-driven vengeful iron-age theist gods frees us to love even more.
Conversionism, Activism, Biblioism, and Amorism.
Join, Do, Read, Love.
Without anything to really sign up for the Conversionism will have to be more virtual. Perhaps you can click on the scarlet A on the upper right hand side of my blog and get some ideas on how to display your conversion from the OUT campaign. The Activism might be better served if I had a list of things to do but I'm not really good at to-do lists so that will have to wait. I'm writing some stuff so perhaps you can read my blog and understand it. Biblioism, thats one out of four. For the final one (Amorism) I simply need to find ways of loving people even more than I do now. That one sounds as easy as sleeping in on a lazy Sunday morning.
As practiced by me the atheist quadrilateral may actually be an atheist line segment. A line segment is better than a point.
We can do this.
Better yet, I can do this.
Let's get it on.
Evangelist, n., A bearer of good tidings, particularly (in a religious sense) such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbors.
-- Ambrose Bierce
I use the latest definition of evangelical which is: “marked by militant or crusading zeal”. However, it is impossible to use the word without traces of its origin clinging to it like a odor. The original Evangelical churches (In the early part of the last century) were, along with some Lutheran churches, part of the Landeskirchen (state run churches) in Germany. The Evangelical churches lobbied unsuccessfully to be the official church for the National Socialists in the early 1930s. It was partially due to the zeal of that sales attempt that the term evangelical was resurrected in the 1970's as a descriptor that some conservative Christians began using to distinguish themselves from Fundamentalists. The definition I use comes from describing zeal as being like that of members of the evangelical groups that arose in the 1970s.
The god of the evangelical Christian churches is very interventionist. Want a truly awkward god? The evangelical Christian churches have one for you.
In addition to an interventionist god the evangelicals believe in being quite interventionist themselves. The evangelical wants to convert you to their belief. Since I have said I like the idea of being an evangelical atheist does this mean I want you to be an atheist? Yes it does actually.
Why do I care if you are an atheist? I care because I think you can use the tools of reason to make a happier life for yourself. Just as with suffering there is no shortage of potential happiness. Why don't you pick up a little more happiness for yourself?
Since I have gone to the trouble of usurping a definition I think it only proper that I steal a few other things.
David Bebbington has deffined a “quadrilateral of priorities that is the basis of Evangelicalism”which he says are:
conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism
I plan on stealing all of the useful bits from this quadrilateral of made up words.
Firstly I should point out that I use the term quadrilateral in the disjointedly stilted way that Bebbington does. It looks to me like he stole the word from the Wesleyans who used the term to define an approach to their religious method (they are often called methodists). The Wesleyan quadrilateral is scripture, tradition, experience and reason. Why the Wesleyans took a name for a four-sided polygon to desribe their set of principles is beyond me. Why Bebbington would steal the poorly thought out Wesleyan term to describe his set of concepts is even more strange. Did anyone stop and think “does this make sense”. Perhaps they did and arrived at the same conclusion I did. The conclusion that it does not make sense and is therefore more humorous to use.
As mentioned earlier the idea of Conversionism helps make the term evangelical worth taking in the first place. I want YOU to join in the new atheist movement.
Activism is pretty self explanatory. Get active, write down what the new atheism means to you and share it. Let your representatives know that you are an atheist and you vote. Let people know that atheists are people with faces and not evil forces plotting to destroy humanity.
Biblicism sounds made up, and probably is. The idea that perfect knowledge comes from the bible is difficult to adapt directly to an atheist “quadrilateral of priorities”. I will adroitly sidestep this problem by simply spelling this wrong and giving it a new meaning. “Biblioism” is also a made up word but it looks similar and and since it doesn't look like it has officially been invented before I can define it. I define it to mean “Leveraging the property of human knowledge wherein every human idea can be written down so that others can read and understand it”. This is obviously an important concept. It means that people can comprehensively communicate everything they think with one another in a archival format and that there is a now named pursuit of accomplishing just that. There are many facets to this activity. This is an ambitious enterprise worthy of being one of the four elements of the quadrilateral of an evangelical movement.
Crucicentism is also a made up word. It means that mutilation of somebody centuries ago is important to you after you die. All the elements of this concept are difficult to examine. As an atheist I find the concept described by this word as vapid as it is ephemeral. We need a better word, and a better more substantial concept. I propose the word “Amorism”. This is a word with at least a century of re-deffinition behind it. I think it is time to define it again. I define it as “Loving and finding ways and means to love more”. I have obviously saved the best concept of my evangelical Atheist quadrilateral for last. We are more than just atheists, we are human atheists. We want you to be part of our world because we love you and shedding the vestiges of guilt-driven vengeful iron-age theist gods frees us to love even more.
Conversionism, Activism, Biblioism, and Amorism.
Join, Do, Read, Love.
Without anything to really sign up for the Conversionism will have to be more virtual. Perhaps you can click on the scarlet A on the upper right hand side of my blog and get some ideas on how to display your conversion from the OUT campaign. The Activism might be better served if I had a list of things to do but I'm not really good at to-do lists so that will have to wait. I'm writing some stuff so perhaps you can read my blog and understand it. Biblioism, thats one out of four. For the final one (Amorism) I simply need to find ways of loving people even more than I do now. That one sounds as easy as sleeping in on a lazy Sunday morning.
As practiced by me the atheist quadrilateral may actually be an atheist line segment. A line segment is better than a point.
We can do this.
Better yet, I can do this.
Let's get it on.
Evangelist, n., A bearer of good tidings, particularly (in a religious sense) such as assure us of our own salvation and the damnation of our neighbors.
-- Ambrose Bierce
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
The scarlet letter
I have been eying Richard Dawkins' OUT campaign for some time. The scarlet letter is a marvelous symbol with delicious literary allusions. I should wear it proudly, and I have decided to put it up on this blog.
I was initially hesitant for several reasons.
The first reason is the unfortunate verbiage. OUT campaign sounds like a gay rights group. I'm not sure why Dawkins chose this name. It was not a good choice. Mathew Shepard was killed a few months after I moved to this little town in Utah. The community he was tortured to death in was not too dissimilar from the little town that sits outside my door, quietly blanketed with holiday snow. Gay rights activists have fought a sometimes loosing battle for justice and understanding that deserves, at this point in history, to be made special from other (even worthy) causes.
The second reason was the fear of inadequacy. The statement "Just because something can be written in a grammatically correct sentence does not mean it is true" may be worthy and true. Coupling my reasoning with my lazy editing style may work out to prove the converse.
I also do not want to entirely reform my lexicon in one fell swoop to be more accurate in spiritual-like matters. I wish to be more concerned with talking about things than talking about how I talk about things. The terminology of life is linked culturally to the terminology of the spiritual. To take the statement that “the Zen Archer is the bow, the arrow and the target” literally is laughable. To ignore the statement's message about shortcuts in mapping perception to action is to ignore a hard-learned lesson in directing human action. The Zen archer statement is incorrect and useful. I will probably use similar shortcuts in my descriptions of activities.
The reasons I do want to put up the scarlet “A” are numerous. I appreciate the collective reasoning of the new atheism. I want there to be a better future for my kids and the morality and thoughtfulness of the atheists I have read and spoken with appears the purest force for developing it. There are many other reasons that I will save expounding on for the future.
The reason I wanted to do it now are fairly pedestrian. On December 15th the local newspaper published a syndicated column by the editorialist Daniel B. Kline. I'm not a big fan of Mr. Kline. He probably writes far better than do I, but his opinions are often limp-wristed and apologetic. His Deist-centric piece on his preference for keeping religion out of public schools was in no way objectionable. He did spend an inordinate amount of wordspace on espousing now culturally normal belief in a god is. But he is the sort of writer that, when he espouses, usually does so about things he thinks are normal. A real modern Norman Rockwell opinionsmith. That's surely why they reprint him in the local newspaper.
On December 20th (it is a biweekly paper ), on the letters page, there were four letters roundly criticizing Mr. Klines piece. They went so far as to threaten ending subscriptions because the paper had printed Mr. Klines opinion. Mr. Klines latest article was NOT printed where it would have normally been.
A sampling of the opinions follows:
“I can’t watch the very few who agree with him whine their way to destroying the important truths that, since the beginning, have been the glue which holds this great country together. It sickens me to see the decline of moral values, increase in crime and destruction, and general loss of hope that is creeping into the hearts, minds, and actions of Americans. An argument could easily be made that as these trends began to rise, our belief in God began to decline.” Aaron Spilker, Stansbury Park
“If, as Kline states, most Americans believe in God, then why must the majority bow to the minority professing secular religious beliefs?” Catham Beer, Tooele
“I love your paper, but I’m sick of the politically correct crap prevailing from the immoral minority. Wake up before you print that kind of garbage again. God will some day bring us down like other powerful societies throughout history.” Dave Brunelle, Stansbury Park
“The word is called faith. Faith in God is what gives everyone hope and a sense of well being. Kids need that.” Jan Wishart, Grantsville
This is a sampling not just of opinion but of the force that would silence dissent and enforce conformity. Atheists may be a minority but we are one of the fastest growing most intelligent and potentially powerful minorities in the US. We live amongst you and we are wear the faces of those you know and trust. I will put up the scarlet letter "A"!
Also, since this is a mostly anonymous blog entitled Adult Onset Atheist there is really nothing more to fear by linking in. I love grand, mostly empty, gestures of defiance.
I was initially hesitant for several reasons.
The first reason is the unfortunate verbiage. OUT campaign sounds like a gay rights group. I'm not sure why Dawkins chose this name. It was not a good choice. Mathew Shepard was killed a few months after I moved to this little town in Utah. The community he was tortured to death in was not too dissimilar from the little town that sits outside my door, quietly blanketed with holiday snow. Gay rights activists have fought a sometimes loosing battle for justice and understanding that deserves, at this point in history, to be made special from other (even worthy) causes.
The second reason was the fear of inadequacy. The statement "Just because something can be written in a grammatically correct sentence does not mean it is true" may be worthy and true. Coupling my reasoning with my lazy editing style may work out to prove the converse.
I also do not want to entirely reform my lexicon in one fell swoop to be more accurate in spiritual-like matters. I wish to be more concerned with talking about things than talking about how I talk about things. The terminology of life is linked culturally to the terminology of the spiritual. To take the statement that “the Zen Archer is the bow, the arrow and the target” literally is laughable. To ignore the statement's message about shortcuts in mapping perception to action is to ignore a hard-learned lesson in directing human action. The Zen archer statement is incorrect and useful. I will probably use similar shortcuts in my descriptions of activities.
The reasons I do want to put up the scarlet “A” are numerous. I appreciate the collective reasoning of the new atheism. I want there to be a better future for my kids and the morality and thoughtfulness of the atheists I have read and spoken with appears the purest force for developing it. There are many other reasons that I will save expounding on for the future.
The reason I wanted to do it now are fairly pedestrian. On December 15th the local newspaper published a syndicated column by the editorialist Daniel B. Kline. I'm not a big fan of Mr. Kline. He probably writes far better than do I, but his opinions are often limp-wristed and apologetic. His Deist-centric piece on his preference for keeping religion out of public schools was in no way objectionable. He did spend an inordinate amount of wordspace on espousing now culturally normal belief in a god is. But he is the sort of writer that, when he espouses, usually does so about things he thinks are normal. A real modern Norman Rockwell opinionsmith. That's surely why they reprint him in the local newspaper.
On December 20th (it is a biweekly paper ), on the letters page, there were four letters roundly criticizing Mr. Klines piece. They went so far as to threaten ending subscriptions because the paper had printed Mr. Klines opinion. Mr. Klines latest article was NOT printed where it would have normally been.
A sampling of the opinions follows:
“I can’t watch the very few who agree with him whine their way to destroying the important truths that, since the beginning, have been the glue which holds this great country together. It sickens me to see the decline of moral values, increase in crime and destruction, and general loss of hope that is creeping into the hearts, minds, and actions of Americans. An argument could easily be made that as these trends began to rise, our belief in God began to decline.” Aaron Spilker, Stansbury Park
“If, as Kline states, most Americans believe in God, then why must the majority bow to the minority professing secular religious beliefs?” Catham Beer, Tooele
“I love your paper, but I’m sick of the politically correct crap prevailing from the immoral minority. Wake up before you print that kind of garbage again. God will some day bring us down like other powerful societies throughout history.” Dave Brunelle, Stansbury Park
“The word is called faith. Faith in God is what gives everyone hope and a sense of well being. Kids need that.” Jan Wishart, Grantsville
This is a sampling not just of opinion but of the force that would silence dissent and enforce conformity. Atheists may be a minority but we are one of the fastest growing most intelligent and potentially powerful minorities in the US. We live amongst you and we are wear the faces of those you know and trust. I will put up the scarlet letter "A"!
Also, since this is a mostly anonymous blog entitled Adult Onset Atheist there is really nothing more to fear by linking in. I love grand, mostly empty, gestures of defiance.
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