Blind Spots

I often receive email articles or internet links to photos of breathtakingly beautiful landscapes, or pictures of unusual animals, or news about someone who was saved from a catastrophic accident, in which God is attributed as the maker or responsible for saving the life of the lucky one.

If I were argumentative, I would tell my friends that if God is responsible for all the beautiful things in nature, then God must also be responsible for the ugly ones, like diseases, poor African children stricken with hunger, or for the deaths of the people who did not make it out alive from the accident. However, the answer from my religious friends would invariably be that God has a reason for doing what he does, and it is not for us to know why.

This kind of cop-out thinking is pervasive among the highly religious. Once they have don their "God Goggles", no naturalistic explanation that is offered can satisfy them. For them, the answer is always God, and God can do no wrong!

Which is why I like this video from The Thinking Atheist, in which Seth talks about the "Blind Spots" in the religiously afflicted. Seth was a Christian for 30 years - including 12 years as a Christian broadcaster. However, Seth ultimately found the bible's answers to be sorely lacking, and upon critical examination of his religion and to "think" for himself, finally put down his God Goggles and became an atheist. I like this video and decided to link it because Seth's story is not only interesting, I find him very funny, and his talk is highly entertaining.

What if all atheists were to leave America?

One of the fervent exhortations by American fundamentalist Christians is to ask atheists to leave America. An example is the following letter to the editor:

Well, a YouTube video answers this question:

Source: The Reason Project

Atheist Universe

I've decided to write summaries about books that I have finished reading. Usually, I only add books that I have read into my Shelfari page (www.shelfari.com/njwong88). However, it seems such a waste not to comment on some of the better books that I have read. And Atheist Universe by David Mills is the book that spurred me to starting this.

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So what can I say? This book is fantastic. It is concise, direct, and written in simple language that most folks will understand. There are many books on atheism, but many of them are dry, or wordy, or may require a high level of vocabulary to understand (it is often very interruptive to call up a dictionary to look up words you don't understand while reading). David Mills uses just enough difficult words to present his case, and whenever he uses a difficult word, he will always give the definition immediately after the word, making trips to the dictionary unnecessary. I love this form of writing. It makes this this book highly readable, even for children.

Since I have already read many of the other atheist literature (primarily The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation), I already know many of the anti-theist arguments that have already been presented. However, I like one particular chapter in David Mills book: "Chapter 8: The Myth of Hell", which presents a new perspective on an old argument, but one that I have not read before.

In this chapter, Mills argues that normally, when a criminal is convicted and sent to prison, this banishment to prison is done mainly for 2 reasons: 

1. to separate the criminal from the public - so as to protect the public from being harmed by the criminal. However, depending on the severity of the crime, this separation is only temporarily for minor crimes. Only with major crimes is such separation permanent.

2. to rehabilitate the criminal - especially for criminals who commit minor crimes - and can be rehabilitated before being returned to the general populace.

However, in the Christian hell, no rehabilitation is possible as a person is banished to hell for eternity, and repeatedly tortured for ever and ever. And the "souls" sent to hell will be eternally separated from the ones sent to heaven regardless of the severity of the crime. And a minor crime such as "not accepting Jesus as the saviour", is a hell inducement route, guaranteeing the non-believer eternal damnation.

This conclusion means that God would rather torture humanity than to forgive humanity unconditionally. This conclusion carries the charge that God created Hell for no reason other than to inflict suffering. In this case, as Thomas Paine noted, the Bible could more accurately be called The Word of a Demon than The Word of God. 

In the Old Testament, Yahweh's punishment for people who displease him (such as non-Jews who worship other gods) is merely being massacred by the blessed Jews (the chosen ones). In the Old Testament, once you die, you die. In fact, only in the New Testament with Jesus arrival did he introduced the concept of eternal punishment in hell, and thus making hell become a place for eternal torment. 

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This book may not be as comprehensive as Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, but it is still covered a lot of ground. David Mills does not claim to put forward any new ideas in his book. All the information in the book, he claims, are already in the public domain and that the book was meant as consolidation, to put these pieces together to "articulate why...all science and all logic indicate that we live in an Atheist Universe."

David Mills has a web site at http://www.davidmills.net/ where an extract from his book can be downloaded.

I highly recommend Atheist Universe.

An atheist call to arms

In 2002, Richard Dawkins presented a speech at TED to appeal for atheists to make public their beliefs and to aggressively fight the incursion of religion into government and politics. The video was released to the internet on April 2007, but I had only watched it today. It is still a compelling video, and provides a very strong argument why atheists should not be apathetic and to let religionists rule society. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html