Wednesday, August 04, 2010

The Stupid! It Burns!

I subscribe to a Google feed on blog posts for "atheist" or "atheism". Rarely does a day go by without reading something mind-bogglingly stupid by religious people about atheism. I'm just going to briefly collect them here and tag with "the stupid it burns"; readers can do their own analysis.

Atheism - Intellectually Informed? Or Intellectually Bankrupt? You Decide?
[Atheists'] disbelief is based upon a rejection of the validity of the biblical accounts from a purely historic and literal perspective. Therefore it must be concluded that ... the Atheists must also be seen as a group who totally ignores the facts with respect to the very nature and purpose of the scriptures.

When Atheists Believe
A strong empirical case can be made to show that Christianity is the only rational explanation of life. For the past six years, I've been teaching students in the Centurions Program to draw a grid listing the four basic questions that most people ask about life: Where did I come from? What's my purpose? Why is there sin and suffering? Is redemption possible? Then, on the other side of the matrix, we list the various philosophies and prominent world religions. By examining how each view answers the four questions, we can determine which worldviews conform to the way things really are. This is the correspondence theory of truth—a thoroughly rational test.

Anatomy of an Angry Atheist: Part 1
Why are the attacks against religion and faith so personal and extreme? ... Why do New Atheist stubbornly hold on to the wildly inaccurate claims that religion is the cause for most wars, and that people of faith are anti-science? ... Why do these authors so love being thought of as naughty rebels, and why are they so angry and bitter? ... While the New Atheists claim to be spokesmen for rationality and a brighter future of peace, many of their positions are plainly irrational, factually wrong, and violent in their implications. Their eagerness to label and destroy such a diverse and fluid institution as religion, and their childish parody of the notion of God, reveals a level of hatred and close-mindedness that points to something which, I suspect, is not directly related to the subject, but that stems from a painful and very personal dilemma that they refuse to consider.

Is Atheism Mere Lack of Belief?
[Atheism] is indeed a choice to refuse to accept whatever evidence for the existence of a supreme being is presented and in most cases - at least 99% of the ones I encounter - to accept that there even is any such evidence! Pretty amazing when you then hear these same people claiming they are "open minded", "logical", "reasonable" etc.!

If you stumble across some egregious religious stupidity, feel free to share in comments. I'm going for work a little more substantive than FSTDT usually publishes.

4 comments:

  1. This is my favourite bit of recent stupid. I hadn't seen the blog in question before and assumed the guy was mocking the illogic (or rather, the super-dodgy premises upon which the logic is based) of the syllogisms. But he really isn't - he thinks this logic is valid:

    http://www.bringthebooks.org/2010/08/van-tillian-syllogisms.html

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  2. The logic really is valid. The premises, however, are stupid.

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  3. We should not disregard these entirely, a few points raised may genuinely be valid and a few may deserve recognition.

    One factor we forget here is that many atheists aren't the scientific intellectuals which we so often encounter often the internet. The contemporary adolescence is being greatly influenced by scientific principles and secularism and many dissent from their indoctrinated theistic beliefs on false grounds. The ironic thing being that the individual who dissents and becomes an atheist does not fully understand their prior theistic beliefs and would not be able to adequately justify their radical change in perspective.

    Almost all atheists I encounter in reality are not the intellectuals I encounter over internet forums and blogs. So this preconception of atheists is comparatively easy to make under specific conditions, or more specifically through observation of the non-intellectual atheist.

    But then that raises the issue of why atheists should be innately intellectuals and have a full understanding of science... Many theists are not theologists and I'm sure the majority of Western theists have never read their Holy book in it's entirety.

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  4. I read each entry in full: if an entry here raised any point of value or deserved recognition for anything but its mind-numbing stupidity, I would not include it.

    ReplyDelete

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