timeimmortal

I don’t usually cruise atheist websites all that much — few enough of them are designed well enough for my tastes, and at any rate I don’t much enjoy having to switch off large portions of my brain just to be able to successfully navigate through one irrational tirade after another. That said, for some reason I decided to check out the Rational Responders website. Their byline reads: “Believe in God? We can fix that.” And yet, reading through their list of ‘frequently asked questions’ (and some of the rest of the site), I was tempted to think instead of Chesterton’s remark regarding Ingersol: “almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.”

If these “Rational” Responders are the speaking voice of atheism in the online realm, religious folks have nothing to fear. These kids — and really, that’s what the “Response Squad” seems to be comprised of: kids with parental authority issues — couldn’t rationalize their way out of a paper bag, as their FAQ list demonstrates quite abundantly.

But before I get into that, there’s a couple of basic form criticisms that I’d like to get out of the way. I’ve designed more than a few websites in the last few years, and the basic idea is that you want your site to show the telltale signs of being “under construction” for as little time as is humanly possible. For me, I prefer to have a site completed within a week of its going live (and preferably well before then; that’s why I use database-driven content management systems as much as possible, because I can develop them in a “sandbox” subdomain and then move them to the “live” site once completed with only a few quick settings changes).

The same goes for site content, which is why it’s positively shameful what sort of state the FAQ for the site are in. Yes, I know (and you’ll see it below, O Reader) that the list maintainer says that it’s still ‘in the works’ (so to speak), and I know that at present the FAQ are flagged as unofficial. That might be fine if the list was only a week or two old. But a quick glance at the FAQ page reveals that the list was posted on November 24, 2006, at 9:28 PM — that’s about a year and a half ago. That the list has been sitting unmaintained for that length of time tells me something, as a site designer, about how unimportant the maintenance of such a list is to the operators of the website. And even though there’s a long discussion thread attached to the initial FAQ posting, the fact that the top post has not been updated in roughly 18 months tells me all I need to know about how little care and concern the “Rational” Responders have for it.

Which would seem to go against their byline. After all, if they are committed to “fixing” people’s belief in God, one would think that site elements like a comprehensive, well-presented FAQ list would be a very important feature. But it’s not. And, what’s more, what content they do have in the list at present (and remember — it’s the top post that counts in site design; proper design dictates that any good material that emerges in subsequent posts on the subject should be incorporated into the top post) is…lacking.

Let’s fisk, shall we?

Title: My idea for the title so people get what we mean when we say RRS all the time.
RRS FAQ - Rational Response Squad Frequently Asked Questions

I wonder how long it took Voiderest to think up that inspired title?

Questions: I have a feeling a lot of this are just general questions for atheists so may not apply to RRS but I know we get the hypocrite and hate comments a lot. Feel free to add, comment, correct, or change things. This is just to get the ball rolling.

It’s either a very big or very unshapely ball, since in the 18 months since Voiderest attempted to get it rolling, it hasn’t really gone anywhere. Oh, some of the discussion which follows up on the initial posting is interesting, but it’s the height of both physical and intellectual laziness that Voiderest hasn’t been bubbling good content back up to the top post.

How can all of you hypocrites?

I guess they couldn’t think of a good answer. Which is a shame, because this is a pretty wide question with a number of examples. To enumerate only briefly:

• Whither morality?
• Why do so many atheistic moral theories (of the sort Sam Harris, for example, is fond of putting forth) end up predicating themselves on the assumption of a non-quantifiable external concept of some kind (in essence, a ‘divinity’)?
• If there is no ‘divinity’ and no ’soul’, then all we are is a meaty outer shell and some opportunistic chemical interactions. Given that, whither reason?
• Moreover, isn’t it the height of irrationalism to claim that the random chemical interactions in our brains that we call ‘thought’ have any meaning whatsoever, and are thus rational and capable of reason?

The notion that one must necessarily be an atheist/agnostic in order to be rational or a person of reason is, I think, perhaps the biggest hypocrisy in light of the fact that the very idea of reason is meaningless absent some notion of telos. Because the plain fact of the matter is that, if the secularists are right and if a human being is little more than a meaty outer container for an internal stew of random or hormonally-driven chemical reactions, why should human beings choose to sacrifice even a moment of the fun- and pleasure-driven “get what you can while you can” hedonistic ethos that is the highest moral reasoning of a purposeless existence for something so banal and demanding as a baby? It is in the “reasoning” of atheism and godlessness that humanity finds the strongest justification for its own extinction — why let something so taxing as procreation get in the way of an endless succession of Friday night romps and Thursday afternoon trips to the shoe store?

Moreover, how can we even say — rationally, and from reason — that human beings, being (in the secular view) little more than a meaty outer container for an internal stew of random or hormonally-driven chemical reactions, are even capable of reason? That seems to be one of the most irrational faith claims yet made, even more irrational than the notion that if in fact there is a God, He sent His only Son to Earth to die and rise again for the forgiveness of sins. At least it makes sense that a deity, if one of such power as the Judeo-Christian God did exist, could arrange for such a set of events to transpire. Reason from randomness? Not so much.

Allowing for the base assumption of the existence of the deity, the claims that follow from that assumption are reasonable. Conversely, by allowing only for the base assumption that humanity seems to have arisen randomly, and that human beings are just animals — some muscle and some bone, and a slough of random chemical interactions — it is wholly irrational to claim that reason even exists, let alone that human beings are capable of grasping at it.

Why do you hate Christians so much?
We don’t many members have confused their love for them, I wouldn’t but I’m too mean to tell people I love them. Now the high volume of claims you see on Christianity here is due mainly to the fact it is one of the larger Religions in the world and one which most of use encounter in some form most of the time. The people on the radio show are American and as such have to deal with the effects on an almost daily bases. If another religion was on top you would see more stuff on them. Also we do address other religions. Links (Threads about other religions here?)

Another form criticism — 18 months later, Voiderest is still too lazy to provide actual links to substantiate his claims.

To be fair, I don’t think most atheists hate Christians (although some that I have met do nurture a deep-seated hatred of all religious folks), but I do think most atheists hate God, or at least hate whatever misinformed notion of God informs their thinking about His non-existence. That’s a far more serious issue.

And the plain fact of the matter is that, when it comes right down to it, atheists — regardless of their professed non-hatred of Christians — seem to have no problem denigrating Christians as irrational and superstitious. They seem to have no problem likening raising a child in, say, the Catholic faith to an act of child abuse. They have no problem demanding that a religious politician not allow his religious convictions (which should, if he is serious about his faith, be the most important thing in his life) to influence his policy-making and voting.

Maybe it’s not hatred…but it certainly isn’t love either.

What if your wrong?
Pascal’s Wager is shit. Link (Answer.com article?)

Once again, Voiderest can’t actually be bothered to link to any effective rebuttal of Pascal’s Wager. Of course, since I’m critiquing form in this paragraph, I should also point out that he doesn’t actually answer the question either. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think is a great tool for evangelism. It’s a valid question, to be sure, but is too often misused by Christians.

The thing is, Christians cannot say with 100% certainty that God exists — we believe that He does, with a great deal of conviction, but we cannot say that there is a 100% certainty that we are correct in that belief (not if we are honest with ourselves, at any rate). Equally, atheists cannot say with 100% certainty that God does not exist — they believe he does not, with a great deal of conviction, but they cannot say that there is a 100% certainty that they are correct in that belief (not if they are honest with themselves, at any rate). Ultimately, only a direct encounter with the divine can confirm the divine to exist with 100% certainty, and for most human beings that’s not something that is likely to happen during their lifetime.

In that understanding, Pascal’s Wager is an interesting and valid question, not as a precursor to an attempt to convert, but as a challenge to the integrity of a person’s particular belief about the existence/non-existence of God. Basically, the Wager asks whether — because we have each wed ourselves to a particular belief about God’s existence — we can accept the potential consequences of our beliefs. Can a Christian accept that he might be wrong about God? Can an atheist accept that she might be wrong about God? Can a Christian, in being wrong, accept that he will find no heaven, nor any hell, upon death? Can an atheist, in being wrong, accept that she may just find a heaven, or a hell, upon death? In either case, is the conviction with which the particular person’s belief is held both sufficiently strong, and sufficiently rational, that the person who holds that belief can both concede the possibility of being wrong and accept that there may be a price to pay (or no price to pay) for that error?

In short, the Wager is a test of how honest each of us is in our commitment to what we each believe about God.

Additional thought: Of course, none of the above begins to address the fact that Voiderest, again, doesn’t even properly answer the question. It’s quite surprising that a supposed rationalist would answer such a question as Voiderest does, rather than replying with a succinct, but on-topic, answer — for example: “Then I guess I’d be wrong. But then, so might you be.” Of course, for such an answer to occur to a person, said person would have to have a shred of intellectual honesty, which is not a trait I normally associate with any person who self-identifies as an atheist (although I’m willing to be charitable to self-declared agnostics).

How can you be agnostic and atheist?
Link (I’m think Ask the Atheist would be good.)

Voiderest evidently couldn’t be bothered to even try with this one.

How can you say there is no god when you can’t prove there is no god?
Bigfoot, fairies, celestial tea pots, Zeus, etc.

I think this is the most disappointing response from the supposedly “Rational” Responders — if, O Reader, you ever needed a picture of intellectual laziness, this would be it.

A quarter of all Britons think that Winston Churchill is a mythical figure. That is to say that one in four British folks honestly believes that Churchill was just another chapter in the epic tale of English cultural mythology, alongside King Arthur and St. George’s dragon. He was another Hercules in their mind, no more real than the tooth fairy or Zeus ever was.

Listing off an arbitrary set of mythical figures is not a sufficient reason to claim that Winston Churchill never existed, and it is likewise an insufficient reason to claim that there is no God, nor any divinity. To be fair, Winston Churchill is reasonably well documented in various historical records. But then, there is also historical evidence that Jesus existed as well — most historians and biblical scholars reject the Jesus myth hypothesis (which is a hypothesis that the “Rational” Responders, incidentally, promote).

Which is why this response, in particular, is disappointing. Any rational person should be able to understand that s/he cannot simply defend the belief that there is no God by saying that there was never a Zeus or a tooth fairy, anymore than a Briton could defend his or her belief that there never was a Winston Churchill by means of the same argument. That the “Rational” Responders have let this particular entry sit in the top post on their FAQ list for about 18 months already is, frankly, both shameful (for them) and telling.

Doesn’t religion have a place for a purpose for life and morality?
If by purpose you mean it gives you a safety blank and by morality you mean a arbitrary set of rules made over a 1000 years ago, maybe. Also Link (Ask the Atheist)

I don’t know why atheists insist on clinging to their comforting belief that religion is a “safety blanket,” when even a cursory reading of the Gospels demonstrates otherwise. Luke 21, anyone?

I choose Christianity not because I need a cosmological hug, but because it is hard. I choose it because it does divide me from friends and family, because it does earn me new enemies (and also new friends), and because I may well suffer persecution one day for being a person of faith.

Comfort? There’s no assurance of that, because my salvation is not something I can say, with 100% confidence, that I have won. For all I know, I could be headed for a big loss…but I choose Christianity anyhow, because it is divisive and because it isn’t easy to be one. If I wanted to live the easy life, I’d be an atheist…and then I wouldn’t have to care about being nice to people, or about having sex before marriage, or about being faithful to my wife…because all I’d care about is “the now”. If there’s no God, and no final judgment, and (really) no ultimate arbiter of morality, then I’m on the hook to compose and uphold my own morality in whatever way and form suits me best, right? And who can really tell me that I’m doing something “wrong”?

Seriously…any atheist who attempts to argue from the “religion is just a comfort blanket” angle betrays his or her own ignorance in sufficient quantity as to turn any further discussion into nothing more than sport on my part. It is passages like Luke 21 that I think of when I dismiss — casually and off-handedly — the claims by atheists that the “problem” of evil in the world serves as an effective argument against the probability of the existence of God. Likewise, passages of this sort are the reason I laugh (heartily!) when atheists tell me that no Christian has ever given them a satisfactory answer to that supposed “problem”.

The fact of the matter is that most (if not all) atheist authors who have prognosticated on the issue of an atheistic morality eventually have to resort to the invocation of something external in order to justify the moral reasoning they are advancing, because they have to get around the fact that absent at least some sense of telos, morality is relative to the individual and therefore left in the hands of each individual to determine — thus, nothing can truly be said to be “wrong” (or they go the route of Provine and argue that things like morality and free will don’t really exist at all, and that punishing people for “crimes” is unjust).

Only in a teleological framework can we find both the rhetorical footroom and the actual justification for stating that some moral concepts are universal; in a purely materialistic framework, any overarching morality can be dismissed as meaningless, especially since all this moral “reasoning” is just the outcome of a few opportunistic chemical reactions in the brain anyhow.

Have you even read [insert holy book]?
Someone here probably has if it is a more mainstream religion, but even if we haven’t we would probably still classify it as irrational if it has a god belief in it.

Here’s another disappointing one from the “Rational” Responders. Do you see it, O Reader?

Let’s flip it around and pretend for a moment that I’m a young earth creationist who firmly believes that the Earth is no more than 10,000 years old, and that evolution is a scientific fiction. And let’s pretend, O Reader, that you ask me if I’ve ever read any modern texts on evolutionary biology. And let’s pretend, O Reader, that I dismiss your question thusly: “I think some of my friends probably have, if it was a book by a more mainstream author, but even if they haven’t we would probably still classify it as fiction if argues from the assumption that evolution is a valid scientific theory.”

Don’t laugh: I’ve had people tell me that.

The fact of the matter is, it’s intellectually lazy, not to mention academically dishonest, to condemn outright as “irrational” something which one has not taken at least a few steps to familiarize oneself with. And I’m sorry, but setting up straw-man misunderstandings of who and what God is, and then rejecting those, does not count either. Simply disagreeing with a core assumption of a text that is relevant to the debate is not sufficient grounds for rejecting or avoiding the text in question; relevance, regardless of our personal tastes and opinions, is relevance, plain and simple.

If one wants to denigrate the theory of evolution, one should first read up as much as one can about the theory and the various evidences that have been presented in support of it. Yes, there is a risk that one might find one’s mind changed about the invalidity of the theory — but that is the risk in any debate, isn’t it? Likewise, if one wants to denigrate a religion, shouldn’t one be expected to have made the effort to familiarize oneself with the holy book, and possibly some of the derived teachings, of that religion, rather than open one’s mouth and be confirmed as an unprepared fool?

Doesn’t [insert holy book] prove there is a god?
No, all it proves is that this one god idea exists, yes there are more then one kind of god.

This might be the sanest and most reasonable statement in the entire “Rational” Responder FAQ section, and I honestly hope there are very few Christians today that are dumb enough to ask a question like this one. That’s not to say that holy books don’t play an important role in the search for what is true (and not true) about God, of course.

I can’t speak to other religions, but it would seem to me that the mystery of Christian faith distills to one fundamental issue: which sources of historical testimony that describe Jesus one accepts or rejects. Most people accept the various Roman records, or the writings of Josephus and others, as factual. So really, the issue can be further distilled:

Either one accepts the Gospels as historical, albeit eye-witness, accounts of the life of Christ, or one does not.

If you’re a Christian, then you accept that the Gospels are — in addition to being powerful, message-communicating texts — eye-witness historical narratives about the life and works of Jesus (as a general rule). If you’re not a Christian, and especially if you’re an atheist, then you reject the Gospels as being such (again, as a general rule).

I realize that I’m over-simplifying a bit, but in a certain sense that’s all the debate between atheist and Christian distills down to. That Jesus existed can, I think, be safely said to be beyond debate. So all that the embrace or rejection of faith in Christ comes down to is whether or not one accepts the historicity of four books that purport to be eye-witness historical narratives about the life and acts of Jesus, who is called Christ. And just like the various bits of evidence presented in support of, for example, evolution, each person needs to look at the evidence and decide whether to accept it or not, and whether or not to shape one’s beliefs according to the results of that decision.

Don’t communist prove we need religion?

Evidently, being a “Rational” Responder means that one can dispense with proper grammar. Once again, Voiderest was evidently too lazy to answer this one. Pity, too, given that the various communist regimes — all officially, by law, atheist — have been the most murderous regimes in human history, far exceeding the worst that even Islam, for all its abysmal violence, has been capable of.

How can you be so un-American?
1. Not all of us on this forum are American.
2. America was founded has a secular nation so we are no more or no less American then the religious. Link (Ask the Atheist)

Again we see a failure to actually provide a link in the 18 months this list has been online.

More to the point, America is a secular nation in some respects…but it is not an atheistic nation (that is, while it does not have a church-derived government, it does not reject, in either its laws or its Constitution, the possibility of God’s existence. Indeed, I believe the current wording of the Constitution tends toward the opposite view, does it not?).

Moreover, anyone who has, say, thumbed through George Washington’s diaries will note that while America was not founded as a church-run nation, there can be little doubt that the inspiration for the legal and moral framework upon which the Constitution was founded was grounded in the best of Judeo-Christian intellectual and moral tradition.

That said, I don’t think it’s un-American to reject the idea that God exists — indeed, the American ideal of freedom pretty much ensures that whether one believes God exists or not, the important thing is that one is free to make such a decision for one’s own self.

But on the flip side, then, one must likewise be free to practice one’s faith, if one chooses to be a person of some religious faith, free from obstruction by others. That means that atheists and the ACLU have to stop telling Christians to cover up crosses, or cease praying before civic meetings if the majority of attendees are religious people of any kind, or refrain from holding Bible studies in schools during spare time/lunch breaks…and then in unused rooms.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

After all, religious folks are no more or less American than atheists.