Tag Archives: atheism

02/24/12

Religious Upbringing and The Basis for Ethics

A friend of mine once commented that my experience of religion, from the way I talked about it, reminded her of the way some people talk about a bad trip on LSD… the kind of story where someone ends by explaining, “And that’s why I’ll never touch the stuff again.”

Well, that’s not completely true. I do read about religion sometimes; look at the last book I reviewed here, for example! I sometimes read about the history of Christianity, or of scriptures, because quite frankly, that was the governing tradition of the West the way capitalism is our governing paradigm today. If you wish to understand Western culture, philosophy, and literature, you need to know about Catholicism and Christianity. (You don’t need to believe in them to do so — in fact, I’d argue believing in them makes understanding them that much more difficult — but you do need to know about them.)

But when I was reading this review of a book by Bart Ehrman — negative, of course, but I expected that — when I tripped on something nonsensical:

I do have some questions about the overall purpose of this book though, e.g., what’s the point? If Ehrman makes an airtight case for forgery in the NT and non-canonical literature then what are we supposed to actually do with that information? Should those of us who hold the NT as an authoritative text suddenly reject its authority?

I’m also curious about how/why a self-professed agnostic would write so much about honesty and deception as if those concepts actually have concrete meaning to a non-theist. In other words, Ehrman can talk about truth and lies all he wants, but I’m left wondering why he cares or how he grounds any kind of belief in such concepts without grounding them in God. It seems that he has to borrow from a worldview that is not his own in order for the issues he raises to even begin to be considered problematic. Ironic? Perhaps. Inconsistent? Definitely.

Now, those of you with your heads screwed on correctly will see the problem here immediately: the blogger in question seems to have some fundamental misconceptions about the relationship between religion and speaking the truth.

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01/7/11

With Gods Like These…

I got the oddest comment on the last post I made. The content was unrelated to my post, but instructed readers to Google a few keywords leading straight to the comment-poster’s own blog, which was about…

Er, well, I’ll let the email I just sent him speak for itself.

Dear Mr. Hagedorn,

Just curious what the connection is, in your head, between my review of a few recent movies — none of them theological in nature at all — and your inane theory that the real sin that got Adam and Eve kicked out of Eden was… (drum roll)… anal sex?

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08/27/10

Immortality?

The Maverick Philosopher discusses the fact that Christopher Hitchens, who is not doing so well, also has not recanted his atheism. Valicella writes:

The contemplation of death must be horrifying for those who pin all on the frail reed of the ego.  The dimming of the light, the loss of control, the feeling of helplessly and hopelessly slipping away into an abyss of nonbeing.  And all of this without the trust of the child who ceases his struggling to be borne by Another.  ”Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.”  But this of course is what the Luciferian intellect cannot do. It cannot relax, it must hold on and stay in control.  It must struggle helplessly as the ego implodes in upon itself.  The ego, having gone supernova, collapses into a black hole.  What we fear when we fear death is not  so much the destruction of the body, but the dissolution of the ego.  That is the true horror and evil of death.  And without religion you are going to have to take it straight.

Uh… not really?

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04/6/10

“Let The Little Children Come To Me…”

… may be close enough to pass as a Bible quote, but I don’t think it says, anywhere in that book, that clerics get to say that to kids so they can rape them with impunity, with the aid of the Church in keeping them out of prison (or other trouble)… and I don’t think it’s specified anywhere that when this institutional crime comes out, the biggest cleric of them all gets to pretend nothing’s going on.

I want to leave aside the fact that this is an obvious, and pathetic, public gaffe which can only serve to harm the Church’s reputation more. Not much more, mind: Catholic laypeople have long known to be cautious of priests alone with little children. Having been raised Catholic, I was quite aware enough to be careful. (Though, I can happily add, I was lucky in never meeting a pedophile priest myself.) Yes, the ball has been dropped. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What I want to highlight here is the internal hypocrisy. Faithful Catholics are expected to do penance, and at least in the Catholicism in which I was raised, penance involved at least a little effort towards making things right. If you punched a friend in the face, and confessed it, you had to apologize to the friend. If you stole something, you’d have to return it in person and tell the owner you were sorry. That’s the kind of “reconciliation” penance I was taught to perform: you had to make things right, not just “apologize” or say a few prayers in solitude and feel sufficiently guilty. Penance and reconciliation were public affairs, relatively public anyway.

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11/18/05

What It’s Like

Marvin linked to these very interesting and worthwhile essays by someone using the handle Darksyde, which describe what it’s like for an atheist to live in American (or any) society.

What it’s Like to be an Atheist

Why I’m an Atheist

Not recommended reading for those who don’t want an honest, no-holds-barred look at what it feels like to be in a minority in terms of absence of religious belief. But if you’ve ever wondered why atheists sometimes seem so angry and almost evangelical in their fervor, especially the first essay is worth reading, even if you know you’ll disagree with the author.

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10/6/05

St Paul as a Duped Henchman of Satan?

… [these] are things which Mormon women submit to because their religion teaches them that the more wives a man has on earth, and the more children he rears, the higher the place they will all have in the world to come—and the warmer, maybe, though they do not seem to say anything about that.
— Mark Twain, Roughing It, Chapter XV

It’s always struck me as odd that mainstream people–religious or otherwise–laugh at the antics of street preachers, but take the conversions of the members of the early Church seriously. Take Paul, for instance. The guy hunted Christians, till one day he fell off his horse and had a vision and then became one, and pretty much transformed Christianity according to his own thinking.

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