This is not good. I just realized that I'd posted my second, longish comment in twenty-four hours on a Glenn Greenwald post, yet I hadn't been able to muster the energy to post here since Wednesday. Actually I've been fairly busy, doing more reading of actual print than I have in some time, but still, that doesn't stop me unless I'm procrastinating for other reasons. Which I guess I am. It's amazing how much you can get done as long as it's not what you are supposed to be doing.
Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average.
A decline in religious observance over the last century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence, he claimed.
But the conclusions - in a paper for the academic journal Intelligence - have been branded "simplistic" by critics.
Professor Lynn, who has provoked controversy in the past with research linking intelligence to race and sex, said university academics were less likely to believe in God than almost anyone else.
That last paragraph sets off all kinds of alarms about Professor Lynn's intelligence and the quality of his research, let alone his claims. So, let's see ... why, he has his own home page, on which he lists "Eugenics" among his interests, and
In 1991 I extended my work on race differences in intelligence to other races. I concluded that the average IQ of blacks in sub-Saharan Africa is approximately 70. It has long been known that the average IQ of blacks in the United States is approximately 85. The explanation for the higher IQ of American blacks is that they have about 25 per cent of Caucasian genes and a better environment.
He has also published defenses of eugenics and is a director of the proudly 'politically incorrect' Pioneer Fund. So this man, despite his stature in certain circles, is not the best source for today's atheists to cite.
Some of them have done just that, though. I found the first two paragraphs quoted at Atheism Soup, though any rational person would immediately recognize that correlation -- in this case between rising IQs and dwindling church attendance -- does not equal cause. Besides, any decently scientifically-literate person should know that there's reason to doubt the equation of IQ with intelligence. Atheism Soup got those two paragraphs, which constituted the entire post, from Deep Thought, which might be a subblog of Atheism Soup. No doubt Atheism Soup's readers, being rationalists, will be as critical as I was, rather than taking such transparent and malign nonsense simply on trust. Snort.
The atheist cult of personality seems to be growing, as shown by the image above. See why I'm feeling a bit down? Hemingway as a role model? Well, as with the corresponding Christian cult of personality, it allows the lazy and mediocre to uplift themselves by identifying with people of higher status.
This is not good. I just realized that I'd posted my second, longish comment in twenty-four hours on a Glenn Greenwald post, yet I hadn't been able to muster the energy to post here since Wednesday. Actually I've been fairly busy, doing more reading of actual print than I have in some time, but still, that doesn't stop me unless I'm procrastinating for other reasons. Which I guess I am. It's amazing how much you can get done as long as it's not what you are supposed to be doing.
Professor Richard Lynn, emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, said many more members of the "intellectual elite" considered themselves atheists than the national average.
A decline in religious observance over the last century was directly linked to a rise in average intelligence, he claimed.
But the conclusions - in a paper for the academic journal Intelligence - have been branded "simplistic" by critics.
Professor Lynn, who has provoked controversy in the past with research linking intelligence to race and sex, said university academics were less likely to believe in God than almost anyone else.
That last paragraph sets off all kinds of alarms about Professor Lynn's intelligence and the quality of his research, let alone his claims. So, let's see ... why, he has his own home page, on which he lists "Eugenics" among his interests, and
In 1991 I extended my work on race differences in intelligence to other races. I concluded that the average IQ of blacks in sub-Saharan Africa is approximately 70. It has long been known that the average IQ of blacks in the United States is approximately 85. The explanation for the higher IQ of American blacks is that they have about 25 per cent of Caucasian genes and a better environment.
He has also published defenses of eugenics and is a director of the proudly 'politically incorrect' Pioneer Fund. So this man, despite his stature in certain circles, is not the best source for today's atheists to cite.
Some of them have done just that, though. I found the first two paragraphs quoted at Atheism Soup, though any rational person would immediately recognize that correlation -- in this case between rising IQs and dwindling church attendance -- does not equal cause. Besides, any decently scientifically-literate person should know that there's reason to doubt the equation of IQ with intelligence. Atheism Soup got those two paragraphs, which constituted the entire post, from Deep Thought, which might be a subblog of Atheism Soup. No doubt Atheism Soup's readers, being rationalists, will be as critical as I was, rather than taking such transparent and malign nonsense simply on trust. Snort.
The atheist cult of personality seems to be growing, as shown by the image above. See why I'm feeling a bit down? Hemingway as a role model? Well, as with the corresponding Christian cult of personality, it allows the lazy and mediocre to uplift themselves by identifying with people of higher status.
If you have been privileged to travel the highways of these United States, you’ve probably seen the billboards with cutesy quips from God.(And if you haven’t, read on: I have video!)White text on black background, featuring bon mots like:
Don’t make me come down there.
-- God.
Which is funny, you know, because Christians are supposed to want God to come down here.“Even so, come, lord Jesus!”Christians in the mainstream churches stopped praying for the speedy arrival of the Kingdom over a thousand years ago; only the fringe sects still keep that part of the traditional faith.But really, you’d only want to put off the judgment if you were, maybe, a bit nervous about your prospects of salvation, wouldn’t you?
I find these billboards no more obnoxious than most, and superior to most religious roadside advertising.They beat “It’s not a choice, it’s a child!” hands down.And some of them were witty enough to make me look forward to the next one.
But of course, not everyone agrees with me.Once I stumbled on Bill Maher ranting about them on some TV show, though I don’t remember his exact objections.And then Greta Christina, bless her heart, put this video on her blog:
“Comedian and videographer Mario DiGiorgio shows what his billboard replies would be if he had the money.... and his replies are freakin' hilarious,” writes Greta Christina.I beg to differ: I wouldn’t advise this comedian to give up his day job. “Eye-for-an-eyesore” is as good as it gets.Especially revealing was the author’s claim to have written his material with “love,” just like a conservative Christian would claim, and his closing admonition, “it doesn’t matter what you believe in … just keep it to yourself and we’ll all get along handsomely.”Freedom of speech (and religion too, evidently) for me, but not for thee.As a faggot, I’m used to hearing the same thing from liberal straights: Do whatever you want in private, but why do you have to broadcast it to the whole world?
The comments were educational too.One commenter was apparently pleased that “somebody actually burned one [of the 'God' billboards] down during rush hour about 2 years ago”, and another wrote, “The desire to take a road trip with a bucket of white paint is alarmingly strong.”I’m sure they’d be just as tolerant if a Bible-thumper were to burn down or deface a secular-humanist billboard.But that’s why we don’t have such things, right?Because we don’t want to offend others by stating our beliefs in public?I do love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.These folks aren’t as different from their religious opposite numbers as they like to think, and that’s why the human race is doomed.Getting rid of one’s religion, or exchanging one’s Koran-belt fundamentalism for a kinder, gentler sect doesn’t seem to change the dynamics of discomfort with different beliefs.
DiGiorgio begins by lamenting the lack of “reverence, recognition and tolerance of everyone’s beliefs”, which I think is overreacting just a tad, but where’s the reverence, recognition and tolerance of everyone’s beliefs in this video?He admits the contradiction in putting a video on the Internet that tells other people to “keep it to yourself,” but a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, so just shut up, awready, you narrow-minded intolerant bigots out there!
And then there's the question of why I, an atheist, would be interested in showing “reverence” to anything?
A good many people confuse “respect for another person’s right to free speech” with “respect for the content of another person’s speech.”They are not at all the same thing. Of course you’re entitled to your own opinion, but I’m not required to agree that it came from God’s mouth to your ear, any more than you are required to agree the same of my opinion.But like it or not, the First Amendment guarantees your (and my) right to be offended; if you don’t like it, I hear that other countries (Canada, Iran) are more concerned for the tender sensibilities of the thin-skinned.
I don’t respect Christianity, but then I don’t respect Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam either.(Well, I admit to having a soft spot in my heart for Judaism – cute Jewish boys, y’know – and a remarkable number of the writers who’ve influenced me most have been Jewish: Walter Kaufmann, Ellen Willis, Bob Dylan, Paul Goodman, Joanna Russ, Noam Chomsky right off the top of my head; but none of them have been observant, so if I respect anything, it’s the absence of religion in their work.)But lately I’ve come to realize that many of my fellow atheists get so worked up over stuff like these billboards is that they don’t get respect, and they want it bad.I don’t respect atheism, let alone demand “reverence, recognition, and tolerance” for it, and I’m an atheist.
The philosopher Michael Neumann wrote an interesting essay on respect, in the wake of the furor over the Danish ‘Mohammed’ cartoons.It reads like a rough draft, written at white heat, but Neumann makes some worthwhile points, like:
it really flies in the face of reality to hold that all persons or cultures or religions are worthy of respect. Is this supposed to be some absolute truth? What is inconceivable about the notion of a contemptible person, culture, or religion? Not long ago, and not only in Western culture, the great sin was pride, and self-esteem was considered quite inappropriate to so insignificant and paltry a thing as a human being. You need not go nearly so far to the surely reasonable idea that some people really haven't done or been anything of which you should stand in awe. …
Respect is not a duty; it is not even desirable in many cases. Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt. To call this sort of restraint ‘respect’ is to disguise clear moral values in gummy slush.
Worse yet, it seems that many of my fellow atheists really want to act like the Bible-thumpers they despise so vocally. They want to work themselves into a frenzy of indignation over other people’s perceived misconduct, to try to silence those who disagree with them, to demand that the landscape be scoured of any messages that could conceivably offend them, and to see themselves as normal, decent, respectable citizens of the Greatest Nation in the World.
Eeeeuuuw.Thanks, but no thanks.I’m reminded of the old joke where a man asks a feminist, “Are you a lesbian?” and she comes back with “Are you the alternative?”These folks are not the alternative to theism. It’s hard for me to see them as being on the same side as me (dividing up into “sides” isn’t a good idea anyway), let alone as the Great Rational Hope of Humankind’s Future.I mean, how can they demand “tolerance”, let alone “reverence,” from theists if they go around having conniptions over freakin’ billboards on the public highways?
If you have been privileged to travel the highways of these United States, you’ve probably seen the billboards with cutesy quips from God.(And if you haven’t, read on: I have video!)White text on black background, featuring bon mots like:
Don’t make me come down there.
-- God.
Which is funny, you know, because Christians are supposed to want God to come down here.“Even so, come, lord Jesus!”Christians in the mainstream churches stopped praying for the speedy arrival of the Kingdom over a thousand years ago; only the fringe sects still keep that part of the traditional faith.But really, you’d only want to put off the judgment if you were, maybe, a bit nervous about your prospects of salvation, wouldn’t you?
I find these billboards no more obnoxious than most, and superior to most religious roadside advertising.They beat “It’s not a choice, it’s a child!” hands down.And some of them were witty enough to make me look forward to the next one.
But of course, not everyone agrees with me.Once I stumbled on Bill Maher ranting about them on some TV show, though I don’t remember his exact objections.And then Greta Christina, bless her heart, put this video on her blog:
“Comedian and videographer Mario DiGiorgio shows what his billboard replies would be if he had the money.... and his replies are freakin' hilarious,” writes Greta Christina.I beg to differ: I wouldn’t advise this comedian to give up his day job. “Eye-for-an-eyesore” is as good as it gets.Especially revealing was the author’s claim to have written his material with “love,” just like a conservative Christian would claim, and his closing admonition, “it doesn’t matter what you believe in … just keep it to yourself and we’ll all get along handsomely.”Freedom of speech (and religion too, evidently) for me, but not for thee.As a faggot, I’m used to hearing the same thing from liberal straights: Do whatever you want in private, but why do you have to broadcast it to the whole world?
The comments were educational too.One commenter was apparently pleased that “somebody actually burned one [of the 'God' billboards] down during rush hour about 2 years ago”, and another wrote, “The desire to take a road trip with a bucket of white paint is alarmingly strong.”I’m sure they’d be just as tolerant if a Bible-thumper were to burn down or deface a secular-humanist billboard.But that’s why we don’t have such things, right?Because we don’t want to offend others by stating our beliefs in public?I do love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning.These folks aren’t as different from their religious opposite numbers as they like to think, and that’s why the human race is doomed.Getting rid of one’s religion, or exchanging one’s Koran-belt fundamentalism for a kinder, gentler sect doesn’t seem to change the dynamics of discomfort with different beliefs.
DiGiorgio begins by lamenting the lack of “reverence, recognition and tolerance of everyone’s beliefs”, which I think is overreacting just a tad, but where’s the reverence, recognition and tolerance of everyone’s beliefs in this video?He admits the contradiction in putting a video on the Internet that tells other people to “keep it to yourself,” but a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, so just shut up, awready, you narrow-minded intolerant bigots out there!
And then there's the question of why I, an atheist, would be interested in showing “reverence” to anything?
A good many people confuse “respect for another person’s right to free speech” with “respect for the content of another person’s speech.”They are not at all the same thing. Of course you’re entitled to your own opinion, but I’m not required to agree that it came from God’s mouth to your ear, any more than you are required to agree the same of my opinion.But like it or not, the First Amendment guarantees your (and my) right to be offended; if you don’t like it, I hear that other countries (Canada, Iran) are more concerned for the tender sensibilities of the thin-skinned.
I don’t respect Christianity, but then I don’t respect Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam either.(Well, I admit to having a soft spot in my heart for Judaism – cute Jewish boys, y’know – and a remarkable number of the writers who’ve influenced me most have been Jewish: Walter Kaufmann, Ellen Willis, Bob Dylan, Paul Goodman, Joanna Russ, Noam Chomsky right off the top of my head; but none of them have been observant, so if I respect anything, it’s the absence of religion in their work.)But lately I’ve come to realize that many of my fellow atheists get so worked up over stuff like these billboards is that they don’t get respect, and they want it bad.I don’t respect atheism, let alone demand “reverence, recognition, and tolerance” for it, and I’m an atheist.
The philosopher Michael Neumann wrote an interesting essay on respect, in the wake of the furor over the Danish ‘Mohammed’ cartoons.It reads like a rough draft, written at white heat, but Neumann makes some worthwhile points, like:
it really flies in the face of reality to hold that all persons or cultures or religions are worthy of respect. Is this supposed to be some absolute truth? What is inconceivable about the notion of a contemptible person, culture, or religion? Not long ago, and not only in Western culture, the great sin was pride, and self-esteem was considered quite inappropriate to so insignificant and paltry a thing as a human being. You need not go nearly so far to the surely reasonable idea that some people really haven't done or been anything of which you should stand in awe. …
Respect is not a duty; it is not even desirable in many cases. Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt. To call this sort of restraint ‘respect’ is to disguise clear moral values in gummy slush.
Worse yet, it seems that many of my fellow atheists really want to act like the Bible-thumpers they despise so vocally. They want to work themselves into a frenzy of indignation over other people’s perceived misconduct, to try to silence those who disagree with them, to demand that the landscape be scoured of any messages that could conceivably offend them, and to see themselves as normal, decent, respectable citizens of the Greatest Nation in the World.
Eeeeuuuw.Thanks, but no thanks.I’m reminded of the old joke where a man asks a feminist, “Are you a lesbian?” and she comes back with “Are you the alternative?”These folks are not the alternative to theism. It’s hard for me to see them as being on the same side as me (dividing up into “sides” isn’t a good idea anyway), let alone as the Great Rational Hope of Humankind’s Future.I mean, how can they demand “tolerance”, let alone “reverence,” from theists if they go around having conniptions over freakin’ billboards on the public highways?
My fellow atheists are such an embarrassment to me. Well, some of them.
I’m not a “relativist”: I very strongly think that Greta Christina is full of shit. I don’t think that one truth is as good as another: I think that her truths are definitely inferior. (On religion, that is: she’s good on some things, like sex education.) What I think is that she’s come up against an argument – maybe that should be in quotes, because it doesn’t amount to much – she doesn’t know how to answer, and so she’s throwing a tantrum over it, calling names like “postmodernist” and “relativist.” That sort of stuff won’t get you into Hell, GC. When I consider that abuse of one’s opponents is a hallowed Christian approach to controversy, it might just get you into Heaven.
But I have faith in the gospel and what it promises me, just like you have faith in your readings. Your suposed [sic] facts and my suposed [sic] facts, what makes mine so wrong and your so right. Are facts from the bible so different from the facts you read from magazines, books and websites....nope. It all boils down to faith. Until you can tell me that you were there from the beginning up until now, you dont really have facts of your own do you. Neither do I, I dont proclaim to like you do. Faith boys, we all have faith, faith in what is up to you. I think I will stick with the gospel on this one.
on which Daylight Atheist goes on to comment, incoherently:
Although this Christian believer didn't notice, what he was actually advocating was postmodernism and relativism. Just like the strawman academics whom conservatives love to hate, he was effectively proclaiming that there's no objective truth and no way to decide between competing worldviews, so we might as well choose whichever one makes us feel best.
Notice the weasel words in there which undermine DA’s claim: “effectively” proclaiming (not really proclaiming, just effectively) and better still, “the strawman academics whom conservatives love to hate” -- a strawman is a nonexistent position, so DA is saying that no one actually holds the position he’s attributing to the commenter – sounds pretty postmodernist / relativist to me. Besides, aren’t those “conservatives” generally conservative religious believers themselves? Why not let one of them attack the commenter?
Now, I imagine there are people who will claim, while waving vaguely at "postmodernism", that there's no objective truth and so we might as well believe whatever makes us feel best -- just as there are people who claim that the theory of Relativity proved that everything is relative, y'know? (Or atheists who claim that morality is for slaves, and that since there is no god, everything is permitted.) It's difficult to know quite how to deal with such claims, without falling into the No True Scotsman fallacy (those people aren't true postmodernists!). Few would hold Einstein responsible for those who claim that he proved "everything is relative", though maybe they should. But I have read enough postmodernist writing that I think I can say that DA is right: this is a strawman position. The academic postmodernists who have been attacked from left and right alike for supposedly undermining Western Civilization and the Enlightenment do not claim that one opinion or position is just as true as another.
And in fact, there’s nothing “postmodern” about what the commenter wrote. Theist apologists have been saying the same thing for many years. Back when he was still an atheist, Antony Flew wrote in God: a Critical Enquiry [1984, but except for a new preface it’s just a repackaging of his 1966 God and Philosophy]:
People with pretensions either to deep wisdom or to worldly sophistication will tell us that everyone knows that you cannot either prove or disprove the existence of God, and the fundamentals of any religion belong to the province of faith rather than of reason. They could not be more wrong. ..
The claim about the different provinces of faith and reason is presumably to be construed as implying that it is either impossible or unnecessary to offer any sort of good reasons …. If this is the correct interpretation – and unless it is, the claim would seem to lack point – then it must be regarded how enormously damaging to faith this contention is, and how extremely insulting to all persons of faith. For it makes any and every such commitment equally arbitrary and equally frivolous. They are all made, it is being suggested, for no good reason at all; and every one is as utterly unreasonable as every other. [ix-x]
Flew commenced his assault on theism by quoting the theologian Karl Barth’s dictum, “Belief cannot argue with unbelief: it can only preach to it!” Barth was no postmodernist or relativist either. If you haven’t read Flew’s God and Philosophy in any of its variant editions or titles, you should, if only to see how he answered Barth.
In my own response to Christianity, I took a rather different tack than many recent atheists. Christians argued about the “facts” of their cult (the word “faith” has become too debased to be applied there), just as DA’s commenter does. “Are facts from the bible so different from the facts you read from magazines, books and websites....nope.” The commenter has just let slip that he, like C. S. Lewis (who was no postmodernist or relativist either) believes that Christianity has “facts,” maybe even “objective” ones, as good as those DA reads from magazines, books, and websites. (I think that’s true, in fact, and I suspect it’s why DA and Greta Christina are so annoyed about it.) I spent a few years looking at those “facts”, and emerged from the experience with my atheistic “faith” renewed and strengthened. Except that’s not quite true either: what I established to my satisfaction was that Christianity is not true; that does not, in itself, prove that atheism is true.
Of course, it took a little more work than just stamping my foot and screaming, “The Devil told you that!” Which is what lobbing epithets like “postmodernist” and “relativist” amounts to. But it was also more interesting and more fun.
Now let me take apart the commenter’s argument, such as it is:
But I have faith in the gospel and what it promises me, just like you have faith in your readings.
It’s not whether I have faith in my readings, it’s whether I have faith in yours.
Your suposed [sic] facts and my suposed [sic] facts, what makes mine so wrong and your so right.
So you agree that your facts are just “supposed”, not real facts? Thanks. My “facts,” however, come from looking at your “facts.” I’ve studied the Bible. It’s false. That doesn’t tell me that any other religion is true, but Christianity is false.
Are facts from the bible so different from the facts you read from magazines, books and websites....nope. It all boils down to faith.
No, it doesn’t. I’m not relying on my “magazines and books” when I talk about Christianity; I’m relying on the Bible and what Christians say about it.
Until you can tell me that you were there from the beginning up until now, you dont really have facts of your own do you. Neither do I, I dont proclaim to like you do.
You don’t, eh? What are you doing posting comments on Daylight Atheism, then, if not to proclaim your “faith”? Not to argue with disbelief, that’s for sure, but to preach to it.
Faith boys, we all have faith, faith in what is up to you. I think I will stick with the gospel on this one.
That’s fine. (Which “gospel,” though? Christians have been at each other’s throats, often literally, for two millennia, over which gospel is the true one.) As long as you don’t try to impose your gospel on anyone else, we shouldn’t have any trouble.
As I said, it' s not much of an argument, but it is an argument. The commenter is making a case that Christian faith ("the gospel") is as valid as atheist "faith." He even believes enough in logic and reason to use them to make his case. Calling him "postmodernist" isn't a response -- it even concedes the debate. (I can't refute you, so I'll just call you names.) Granted, his stance is infuriating to missionary atheists who believe that every knee must bend and every head bow to them, but one of the risks of reasoned argument is that you can't force your opponent to change his or her mind.
It would be interesting to press this commenter on the divisions among Christians, or among world religions generally. (I’d also have to acknowledge the differences among atheists.) He really has no argument here, and we end up with “each to his own taste,” or at least gospel. So I’d want to press him on whether he really regards ‘sticking with the gospel’ so whimsically, as if it made no more difference than preferring chocolate to vanilla. It seems that he’s falling back on a position rather like Pascal’s wager, which as Flew also pointed out many years ago, isn’t very helpful. What if it turns out that the universe is really run by the gods of ancient Egypt, and they send Christians to Hell? What if Yahweh is boss, but he doesn’t like people who bet on his existence? I sometimes tell people like this commenter cheerfully that I’ll see them in Hell, since their position will (on Christian presuppositions) very likely land them there along with me, with Greta Christina and Daylight Atheist watching our torment from Heaven.
My fellow atheists are such an embarrassment to me. Well, some of them.
I’m not a “relativist”: I very strongly think that Greta Christina is full of shit. I don’t think that one truth is as good as another: I think that her truths are definitely inferior. (On religion, that is: she’s good on some things, like sex education.) What I think is that she’s come up against an argument – maybe that should be in quotes, because it doesn’t amount to much – she doesn’t know how to answer, and so she’s throwing a tantrum over it, calling names like “postmodernist” and “relativist.” That sort of stuff won’t get you into Hell, GC. When I consider that abuse of one’s opponents is a hallowed Christian approach to controversy, it might just get you into Heaven.
But I have faith in the gospel and what it promises me, just like you have faith in your readings. Your suposed [sic] facts and my suposed [sic] facts, what makes mine so wrong and your so right. Are facts from the bible so different from the facts you read from magazines, books and websites....nope. It all boils down to faith. Until you can tell me that you were there from the beginning up until now, you dont really have facts of your own do you. Neither do I, I dont proclaim to like you do. Faith boys, we all have faith, faith in what is up to you. I think I will stick with the gospel on this one.
on which Daylight Atheist goes on to comment, incoherently:
Although this Christian believer didn't notice, what he was actually advocating was postmodernism and relativism. Just like the strawman academics whom conservatives love to hate, he was effectively proclaiming that there's no objective truth and no way to decide between competing worldviews, so we might as well choose whichever one makes us feel best.
Notice the weasel words in there which undermine DA’s claim: “effectively” proclaiming (not really proclaiming, just effectively) and better still, “the strawman academics whom conservatives love to hate” -- a strawman is a nonexistent position, so DA is saying that no one actually holds the position he’s attributing to the commenter – sounds pretty postmodernist / relativist to me. Besides, aren’t those “conservatives” generally conservative religious believers themselves? Why not let one of them attack the commenter?
Now, I imagine there are people who will claim, while waving vaguely at "postmodernism", that there's no objective truth and so we might as well believe whatever makes us feel best -- just as there are people who claim that the theory of Relativity proved that everything is relative, y'know? (Or atheists who claim that morality is for slaves, and that since there is no god, everything is permitted.) It's difficult to know quite how to deal with such claims, without falling into the No True Scotsman fallacy (those people aren't true postmodernists!). Few would hold Einstein responsible for those who claim that he proved "everything is relative", though maybe they should. But I have read enough postmodernist writing that I think I can say that DA is right: this is a strawman position. The academic postmodernists who have been attacked from left and right alike for supposedly undermining Western Civilization and the Enlightenment do not claim that one opinion or position is just as true as another.
And in fact, there’s nothing “postmodern” about what the commenter wrote. Theist apologists have been saying the same thing for many years. Back when he was still an atheist, Antony Flew wrote in God: a Critical Enquiry [1984, but except for a new preface it’s just a repackaging of his 1966 God and Philosophy]:
People with pretensions either to deep wisdom or to worldly sophistication will tell us that everyone knows that you cannot either prove or disprove the existence of God, and the fundamentals of any religion belong to the province of faith rather than of reason. They could not be more wrong. ..
The claim about the different provinces of faith and reason is presumably to be construed as implying that it is either impossible or unnecessary to offer any sort of good reasons …. If this is the correct interpretation – and unless it is, the claim would seem to lack point – then it must be regarded how enormously damaging to faith this contention is, and how extremely insulting to all persons of faith. For it makes any and every such commitment equally arbitrary and equally frivolous. They are all made, it is being suggested, for no good reason at all; and every one is as utterly unreasonable as every other. [ix-x]
Flew commenced his assault on theism by quoting the theologian Karl Barth’s dictum, “Belief cannot argue with unbelief: it can only preach to it!” Barth was no postmodernist or relativist either. If you haven’t read Flew’s God and Philosophy in any of its variant editions or titles, you should, if only to see how he answered Barth.
In my own response to Christianity, I took a rather different tack than many recent atheists. Christians argued about the “facts” of their cult (the word “faith” has become too debased to be applied there), just as DA’s commenter does. “Are facts from the bible so different from the facts you read from magazines, books and websites....nope.” The commenter has just let slip that he, like C. S. Lewis (who was no postmodernist or relativist either) believes that Christianity has “facts,” maybe even “objective” ones, as good as those DA reads from magazines, books, and websites. (I think that’s true, in fact, and I suspect it’s why DA and Greta Christina are so annoyed about it.) I spent a few years looking at those “facts”, and emerged from the experience with my atheistic “faith” renewed and strengthened. Except that’s not quite true either: what I established to my satisfaction was that Christianity is not true; that does not, in itself, prove that atheism is true.
Of course, it took a little more work than just stamping my foot and screaming, “The Devil told you that!” Which is what lobbing epithets like “postmodernist” and “relativist” amounts to. But it was also more interesting and more fun.
Now let me take apart the commenter’s argument, such as it is:
But I have faith in the gospel and what it promises me, just like you have faith in your readings.
It’s not whether I have faith in my readings, it’s whether I have faith in yours.
Your suposed [sic] facts and my suposed [sic] facts, what makes mine so wrong and your so right.
So you agree that your facts are just “supposed”, not real facts? Thanks. My “facts,” however, come from looking at your “facts.” I’ve studied the Bible. It’s false. That doesn’t tell me that any other religion is true, but Christianity is false.
Are facts from the bible so different from the facts you read from magazines, books and websites....nope. It all boils down to faith.
No, it doesn’t. I’m not relying on my “magazines and books” when I talk about Christianity; I’m relying on the Bible and what Christians say about it.
Until you can tell me that you were there from the beginning up until now, you dont really have facts of your own do you. Neither do I, I dont proclaim to like you do.
You don’t, eh? What are you doing posting comments on Daylight Atheism, then, if not to proclaim your “faith”? Not to argue with disbelief, that’s for sure, but to preach to it.
Faith boys, we all have faith, faith in what is up to you. I think I will stick with the gospel on this one.
That’s fine. (Which “gospel,” though? Christians have been at each other’s throats, often literally, for two millennia, over which gospel is the true one.) As long as you don’t try to impose your gospel on anyone else, we shouldn’t have any trouble.
As I said, it' s not much of an argument, but it is an argument. The commenter is making a case that Christian faith ("the gospel") is as valid as atheist "faith." He even believes enough in logic and reason to use them to make his case. Calling him "postmodernist" isn't a response -- it even concedes the debate. (I can't refute you, so I'll just call you names.) Granted, his stance is infuriating to missionary atheists who believe that every knee must bend and every head bow to them, but one of the risks of reasoned argument is that you can't force your opponent to change his or her mind.
It would be interesting to press this commenter on the divisions among Christians, or among world religions generally. (I’d also have to acknowledge the differences among atheists.) He really has no argument here, and we end up with “each to his own taste,” or at least gospel. So I’d want to press him on whether he really regards ‘sticking with the gospel’ so whimsically, as if it made no more difference than preferring chocolate to vanilla. It seems that he’s falling back on a position rather like Pascal’s wager, which as Flew also pointed out many years ago, isn’t very helpful. What if it turns out that the universe is really run by the gods of ancient Egypt, and they send Christians to Hell? What if Yahweh is boss, but he doesn’t like people who bet on his existence? I sometimes tell people like this commenter cheerfully that I’ll see them in Hell, since their position will (on Christian presuppositions) very likely land them there along with me, with Greta Christina and Daylight Atheist watching our torment from Heaven.
This is not good. I just realized that I'd posted my second, longish comment in twenty-four hours on a Glenn Greenwald post, yet I hadn't been able to muster the energy to post here since Wednesday. Actually I've been fairly busy, doing more reading of actual print than I have in some time, but still, that doesn't stop me unless I'm procrastinating for other reasons. Which I guess I am. It's amazing how much you can get done as long as it's not what you are supposed to be doing.