timeimmortal

Frankly, I’m not surprised.

It’s still a bit early to tell, but it would appear that Jim Adkisson — charged with first-degree murder after a shooting at a Unitarian Universalist church that left two dead and several wounded — was something of an anti-religious bigot.

The man being questioned by police in a deadly church shooting was a “nice guy” who became upset when the subject of religion came up, according to his neighbors.

Jim Adkisson’s neighbors in a Knoxville suburb described him as quiet and helpful, but sensitive about certain topics.

“I was telling him about my daughter graduating from Bible college and I was a Christian and stuff, and he just automatically almost turned angry,” neighbor Karen Massey told WVLT-TV, a CNN affiliate.

“He was angry with his parents because they had made him go to church all his life,” she told the station.

“When the subject of Religion came up, it set off like a light in him or something I noticed,” Massey told WATE-TV, another CNN affiliate. “And at that point I thought I’d never bring up religion again.”

Adkisson, 58, is charged with first-degree murder after the shooting at a Unitarian church during a children’s play Sunday morning, officials said.

Oh, and yeah…he was a quiet loner and a “nice guy” (let’s leave aside the fact, I suppose, that nice people don’t typically shoot other people in cold blood). But it would appear that he harboured a deep-seated hatred of all things religious as well. One wonders if his manifesto, found in his car at the site of the attack, will read like an excerpt from God Is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens?

From P. Z. Myers to Richard Dawkins, one struggles to find an iconoclast of atheism who is willing to actually stick his neck out and display a little courage.

In the case of P. Z. Myers, well…it’s been two weeks, and he still hasn’t made good on his threat to desecrate a Eucharistic host. And he sounded so defiant, so confident, earlier this month!

In the case of Richard Dawkins, well…he just doesn’t have the stones to debate an intellectual equal. Oh, he’s fine against two-bit televangelists. But he seems to be attempting to do everything in his power to avoid having to go up one-on-one against the likes of .

These are good events to see transpire; they give hope. After all, many people have wedded their own philosophical views to the tripe that the likes of Dawkins, Myers, Christopher Hitchens, and other “New Atheists” churn out; that such tripe can be shown up for what it is so easily, and that its proponents can be shown up as cowards so consistently, suggests that in the long run, this new atheism won’t last.

In that, it is rather like most other heresies the Church has had to endure.

Evidently, Christopher Hitchens posed a question to Dinesh D’Souza, who came back with a rather surprising answer that very handily turned Hitchens’ supposed point back around to incriminate atheism just a little bit.

This seems to be a popular tactic (Vox Day uses it as well), and one which can be applied fairly consistently. But what I was struck by was not the reversal itself, but rather the numbers involved.

Here is the thrust of Hitchens’ point: God seems to have been napping for 98 percent of human history, finally getting his act together only for the most recent 2 percent? What kind of a bizarre God acts like this?

I’m going to answer this argument in two ways. First, I’m going to show that Hitchens has his math precisely inverted. Second, I’ll reveal how Hitchens’ argument backfires completely on atheism. For my first argument I’m indebted to Erik Kreps of the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research.

An adept numbers guy, Kreps notes that it is not the number of years but the levels of human population that are the issue here. The Population Reference Bureau estimates that the number of people who have ever been born is approximately 105 billion. Of this number, about 2 percent were born before Christ came to earth.

“So in a sense,” Kreps notes, “God’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect. If He’d come earlier in human history, how reliable would the records of his relationship with man be? But He showed up just before the exponential explosion in the world’s population, so even though 98 percent of humanity’s timeline had passed, only 2 percent of humanity had previously been born, so 98 percent of us have walked the earth since the Redemption.”

I suppose some will be tempted to attempt to argue against this by complaining that God’s timing is still suspect — why not incorporate the other 2%? D’Souza doesn’t quite deal witht this objection, but he does note that for most of humanity’s approximately 100,000-year run thus far, we haven’t had a lot to show for ourselves. Major social and technical advancements began five or six thousand years ago; for over 90,000 years before that, humanity (as far as we can tell from what historical evidence can be found) lived primitively.

In light of that, God’s timing of His revelation, and especially of His gift of redemption, not only encompasses the vast majority of people who have ever existed, but also more or less coincides with a leap forward in human knowledge, a sort of awakening — as though man’s eyes were suddenly opened.

Or as though, as D’Souza notes, a soul was suddenly breathed in, because at last mankind was ready to know and become more.

Vox Day responds to an atheist critic of his book, The Irrational Atheist, with his usual barbed wit.

…the reason no one looks askance at Christian accoutrements is that the Christian who makes a public statement is making statement about himself and his own beliefs. Atheists, on the other hand, are making a statement about everyone else and everyone else’s beliefs. Unsurprisingly, everyone else tends to look on this askance.

Let me see if I can explain this in sufficiently simple terms. If I wear a shirt that says “I like chocolate”, this does not offend anyone who prefers strawberry or vanilla. It is merely providing you with information about me. If, on the other hand, I wear a shirt that says “Vanilla is evil and everyone who likes it is stupid and bad”, then I should not be surprised when those who happen to like vanilla are not favorably disposed towards me. It is not only providing you with information about me, it is providing you with information about my negative attitude towards you. And to those atheists who are so narcissistic as to believe that another individual’s Religion is a statement that somehow concerns them, I merely say: Get over yourself! Life, the universe and everything are not about you!

There are those who wear their atheism in approximately the same way that Christians and other religious people wear their beliefs — matter-of-factly, presented simply as an aspect of character that intends to say nothing about what other people might think or to impose an opinion thereupon. On the internet, at least, such level-headed sorts are a bit more of a rarity, though not impossible to find.

But on the Internet, as in real life, there are also those who are very “out there” in their atheism, to the point that Vox Day describes above. And whereas all but the most hardcore Christian evangelists (and Mormons, and Jehovah’s Witnesses) tend to present their case in the form of a dialogue, it has been this blogger’s experience that evangelistic atheists tend to present themselves as “the learned” dictating “the truth” to “the deluded” proles into the midst of which they have dared to wander.

This is equally true of atheist “accoutrements” that one typically sees out and about. The “Jesus Fish” is relatively innocuous, whereas the “Darwin Fish” is not so innocuous; the “Jesus fish” tells us only about the beliefs of the driver of the car it adorns, while the “Darwin fish” seems to be intended as a “teaching moment” that the atheist in the adorned car would like to offer to all the other drivers around him (the gender pronoun here is significant; it is usually a man in a car thusly adorned).

(The critic to whom Vox is responding is one notable exception, then.)

At any rate, here’s a couple of other good barbs from Vox:

Ethical belief systems are far less similar than atheists would usually have one think, of course, an atheist attempting to compare ethical systems is rather like a deaf man attempting to distinguish between Mozart and Vivaldi.

This is something to keep in mind, I think, the next time I’m having to deal with the old moral relativism canard.

The relevant point isn’t that religious people don’t ever kill - all are fallen - but that religious people are ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE less likely than atheists to kill when they are in positions that enable them to do so. I suppose it should be expected that Kelly would find this statistical reality to be an incredible coincidence, though, since her entire worldview is founded on a series of incredible improbabilities occurring for no reason at all. Life must be interesting for the atheist, coming as it does as a series of totally unexpected, completely unconnected surprises.

I don’t know about you, good Reader, but if all I had to believe about life was that it was an improbable result of unpredictable reactions that occurred for no particular reason, I’d probably be an alcoholic….like Christopher Hitchens.

Update: Welcome, WebElf readers!

When Christopher Hitchens gets right down to it, he can be one heck of a grand journalist. Yes, when the discussion topic shifts toward Religion, the atheist in him seems to get the better of his good sense, and he seems unable to sort out reason from anger. But when he just sets himself to the task of journalism, he can produce some truly amazing work.

I understand that in the U.S. right now, there is a huge debate going on over the interrogation methods used by U.S. intelligence gatherers when trying to extract information from captured jihadis, and whether those methods include or count as torture. It should be noted that the Church condemns torture as a grave moral evil, which it indeed is, and this is more or less the tone of the debate in the U.S. as well; on one hand, there are people arguing that it is a legitimate method of extracting information, and on the other there are people saying that it is wrong.

Into the middle of this comes Mr. Hitchens. The skillful journalist decided that there was only one way to get to the truth about waterboarding: experience if first-hand. And so he did.

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning -— or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and -— as you might expect -— inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

…The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.” I could have hugged him for saying so, and just then I was hit with a ghastly sense of the sadomasochistic dimension that underlies the relationship between the torturer and the tortured. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Yeah, it’s torture.

Good on Hitchens for doing his level best to fully understand the process of waterboarding, and good on him for being so candid in his writing about it afterwards. This is an issue which needs to be brought to light and resolved, because it is unconscionable that the U.S. employ such techniques in its attempts to root out terrorism. Barbarity is for the enemy, not for those who supposedly value freedom.

Another wave of atheists seems to be upon me; while I can’t quite set my watch by them, at least I can be assured that there will be periodic sources of content not related to doings on any other blog save this one, which I appreciate.

In this case, the amusingly-handled Aspentroll writes in with a few thoughts on this article.

“Atheism will endure, as it has for many ages now. But it will never dominate a free people, and in due course gives way to the spiritual. Falsehood must necessarily give way to truth in the end, or at least to a less severe falsehood.”

The word “atheism” above could be replaced by the word “Religion” or “Christianity” and the rest of the quote would be just as true.

Atheists believe that the Bible is a huge falsehood and to pattern your life on such a nebulous writing is in most cases dangerous. You cannot govern a country using the laws of the bible which seems to be what some “fundies” want. We would all be up in arms if Sharia Law was allowed in the US, because it is archaic and discriminatory against women and free thought.

Atheism, agnosticism and free thought is the only check and balance we have to keep overly zealous delusional people from taking over and spoiling what is a normal modern way of life.

Did the reader note the tacit suggestion that religious people are necessarily delusional? The footnote to this more recent article seems relevant to mention here.

A good first question I might ask is: what checks and balances exist to keep overly zealous atheists from taking over and spoiling what is a normal, modern way of life that, in the West at least (though it perhaps does not always realize it), benefits greatly from reserves of Christian moral capital built up over the centuries? History has demonstrated that those states which have made atheism an explicit policy of the state have inexorably become brutal and bloody-minded, and several examples of the trend persist to this day.

The Mark Shea article I cited previously addresses this point rather directly: it is within human nature to desire to believe, and when force of will fails to ensure that the populace does not stray back toward the spiritual, force of arms is a necessary recourse of the atheistic state. It might be easy to laugh this off as fallacy, but one observes that in the explicitly atheistic regimes in places such as the Soviet Union, Burma, China, and North Korea (an incomplete list of examples, but sufficient for our purposes) did have something of a penchant for murderously cracking down on spiritual movements and religions within their borders. Certain exceptions to the trend exist, of course, but only in those cases where the religion(s) in question — the Orthodox Church in Russia, the “Catholic” Church in China — has allowed itself to be co-opted by the state.

One possible objection is that the generally secular regimes in many Western nations do not actively persecute the religious faithful in their midst. While the statement about persecution is up for debate, it is generally true that secular Western states do not, at least, murderously persecute their religious citizens. But then, even in various Scandinavian nations, the secularism itself is not explicit state policy, and most of those states still acknowledge that there is a Christian aspect to their origins.

As to the quote of mine that Apentroll cites in opening his message, it should be observed that his attempt to gainsay it, in the first sentence of his response to me, really amounts to little more than saying “I know you are, but what am I?” Although it sounds more reasonable than that on the surface — heck, it even sounds somewhat rational — the statement itself can be revealed to be something of a patent falsehood, on several levels, upon closer examination.

First off, Christianity’s aim — and the aim of true religion (as opposed to the various false teachings one can stumble across from time to time*) — is freedom. And by freedom, I don’t mean being free “from rules of conduct or social constraints” (as the all-too talented authors of the character of Durandal in the Marathon series of games so eloquently word it). I do, however, mean being free “to understand, to imagine, to make metaphor.”

Freethinking, a misnomer if ever there was one, actually ruins freedom. “Freethinkers supposedly want “the pursuit of ideas for their own sake,” but no one pursues ideas simply for their own sake, but in order to understand, to act or to believe, or to have some combination of these. Men pursue ideas so that they may understand the world, and they seek to understand the world to have wisdom. Men desire wisdom in order to live well, and part of living well is to pursue and know the Good, and the Good is that which fulfills human nature and causes it to flourish. The desire to know is a natural desire, one implanted in us as part of our created being; we yearn to know and to enter into the unknown because we yearn for unity with the One Who desires that all things be united in Him. If no religion had ever caused men to live virtuously and flourish, religion would have disappeared ages ago. If no religion had produced saints and cultivated the finest aspects of human nature, very few would adhere themselves to it and even then it would only be the mad and obsessive. There is nothing interesting in rehearsing the catalogue of crimes that religious adherents have committed against each other, since men have always been slaughtering and oppressing one another and they have tended to do more of it when they are less in thrall to their religious tradition than when they are strictly obedient to it. What is remarkable is how much at least some religions have contributed to the civilisation and edification of men, which would hardly seem probable if they were not much more than elaborate exercises in self-deception and nonsense.”

One point, in particular, that can be taken out of the above quotation is that “we yearn to know and to enter into the unknown because we yearn for unity with the One Who desires that all things be united in Him.” It is the result of no accident that science and discovery flourished in the Christian West after ending up misfiring almost everywhere else in the world (historically speaking). As David Warren notes, “[to] those who know some history, the modern sciences emerged in an unambiguously Christian milieu. They flourished, over centuries in the West, as the direct result of the Judaeo-Christian teaching that “God does not contradict Himself.” The whole notion of unalterable physical laws, and thus a universal order that will repay inquiry, is the product of a theological position unique to the West. It is a view that has been glimpsed in other civilizations, but could only be doggedly pursued in this one. Science was stillborn in all other civilizations.”

And the same is true of the wider concept of freedom. Nowhere else in the world, save in a West born out of Christendom, did the concept of human freedom, individual liberty, and human rights genuinely flourish. It did not, certainly, flourish in the Islamic world, nor in the castes of Hinduism in India, nor in any of the places where Buddhism took hold, nor in…any other place, really, save for the West that Christendom birthed. Indeed, the ideas that man should be free and that all men are “equal” is, ultimately, only defensible from within a teleological framework, and then a Christian teleology.

And in the numerous examples one could draw out of the 19th and 20th centuries, one can observe that in those regimes where atheism has, so to speak, become the law of the land, not only has human freedom been impaired and/or outright trampled on, but so too has science, to say nothing of human rights.

Now, I will grant that I stand in agreement with Aspentroll’s objetion to governance by “fundies” — fundamentalism leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Equally, though, I don’t think that society has any right to demand that a politician leave his Christianity at the door when he takes office.

Atheists are welcome to consider the Bible a book of falsehoods; I consider it God’s inerrant, infallible revelation to the world**. Who is to say which of us is right? I will grant that many, many people have a poor understanding of exactly what the Bible teaches, and fundamentalists seem especially prone to this unfortunate reality. But is it genuinely dangerous to pattern one’s life on the core teachings of Scripture? Exactly how terrible a place would the world be to live in if we all actually followed what Christ taught? Exactly how terrible a place would the world be to live in if everyone followed, as a bare minimum, the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes, and patterned their lives on the concepts articulated therein?

I very much doubt it would be a perfect place to live in…but I’ve no doubt that it would be a much better world. But then, Chesterton had it exactly right when he noted that “the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried.”

I also agree with Aspentroll that it would be horrible if Islamic sharia law became the law of the land, in Canada or anywhere else. I suspect that Aspentroll, however, has temporarily taken leave of reason and erroneously assumes that because some types of religious law are brutal and evil, all forms of religious law must necessarily also be brutal and evil. It’s a rather common logical fallacy among atheists to assert this — Christopher Hitchens is particularly vulnerable to it.

The main problem with the assertion is that a thing may be true even if certain individuals don’t accept it as being true. This is easily understood in the case of the fundamentalist objection to e.g. the theory of evolution and the geological research that has revealed the approximate age of the Earth. Young Earth Creationism insists, passionately, that Earth is a mere 6,000 years old, and most creationists of this bent do not accept as truthful or valid the various discoveries made in the fields of geology, astronomy, and evolutionary biology (among others). That doesn’t mean that the theories and discoveries aren’t true, however.

The same is true in regard to atheistic assertions regarding religions. Aspentroll would hardly be the first atheist to look at, say, the evils perpetrated in the name of Islam and declare that all religions are murderous death cults obsessed with paedophilia and suicide belts. That might come as news to Buddhists, and indeed to most Christians, but not everyone can be counted on to let facts get in the way of good rhetoric, especially if it sells books with provocative titles. And yet, a more reasonable, rational person would notice that there are many critical differences between, say, Islam and Catholicism, visible both by a close analysis of doctrine and by taking an honest, objective look at the actions of the followers of each respective faith on a global scale.

As previously noted, the creature we call a human being is wired to be a believer, and the only real question is what said human being will believe in. We’ve seen this played out through history, and we see its logical consequences played out in that movement which denies this very aspect of human nature: atheism. In individual atheists like Sam Harris or Andre Comte-Sponville, we see the beginnings of post-atheistic spiritualism beginning to creep in. The same trend can be observed in Russia, in the wake of the collapse of an explicitly atheistic regime. It’s regrettable that the spirituality that such people are gravitating towards is, quite often, some new form of paganism (or “new” in that Roger Daltry “same as the old boss” sense of the word), although it is good that people are also finding, or rediscovering, the Church.

There seems to be a rather pernicious lie going around that religion and freedom are antithetical to one another; this is not completely true. It is true in regard to specific religions (e.g. Islam), but not in regard to the Christian truth. Indeed, it was a particularly Christian sense of telos that informed the very constraints, concepts, and ideals which enabled the West to value freedom. By contrast, the application of atheistic ideals as the formative values of a state has tended to be the true antithesis of freedom, of science, and of human rights.

And in perhaps the most amusingly ironic twist, I just realized that if I re-worded Aspentroll’s message to me and flipped the references to religion and atheism in every instance (and substituted the title of any New Atheist tract for “the bible”), the message itself would not only be a lot more truthful, but also a lot more historically defensible.

* this statement said with tongue firmly implanted in cheek