The Atheist Blogger

It was a cheap shot, but it was well worth it.

In case Ray removes my comment (first one on the list) here it is, in all its grammar nazi style:

If Mr. Gunther has been writing letters like that all these years then he’s been doing it wrong. If you start a letter “Dear Sir” you need to end it “Yours faithfully”, not “Yours sincerely”.

Damn that felt good. Nice to know Ray’s minions fail at more than just science.

…

Just got a text from my housemate Ewan who has gone home for a few days:

I left net cable behind :( This must be what hell feels like…

I’d have to agree.

…and entering the world of SPORE.

The video game arrived today, I’m doped up on caffeine, and you probably won’t hear from me for several weeks. Do not fret, I am probably going to be alive at the end of it.

If I do manage to pull myself away from the game I’ll try to write something every day or so. September is going to be a busy month since university starts in 2 weeks, but my student group is going to be busy on campus getting new members :D

Besides, it seems like every single atheist blog is talking about Sarah Palin at the moment, and seeing as I honestly don’t get American politics that much, it’ll be a nice break. Suffice to say, I think most people in England reckon Sarah Palin is the equivalent of the Labour Party’s “Let’s boost Gordon Brown’s image” campaign. It doesn’t work, it was never going to, and Gordon Brown will be out of office by the next election, if not sooner. Assuming John McCain actually survives till November, he will be completely annihilated by Obama.

Today’s article was written by Luis Dias, a blog subscriber.

Christians and other religious people often use the moral argument not only as evidence of a deity, but also as a philosophical weapon against atheism, and the argument, though never made explicit, implicitly goes as follows:

• God is the Creator of Morals
• Atheists deny existence of God, therefore
• The atheists’ utopia is an amoral society

They obviously cite Stalin and Pol Pot’s example to strengthen this idiocy. Further more, they say, without a divine reference, an infinite guardian of values of right and wrong, atheists are left dumbfounded and such a godless society eventually recedes to the stone age, and this is where they even bring the 2nd law of thermodynamics and equate it to the theology of the original sin (!)

Apart from the implicit circular reasoning of it which could be teleported to any kind of silly argument, like for instance:

• God is the Creator of milk
• Atheists deny the existence of God, therefore
• There’s nothing stopping “milk” of degenerating to a poison. (remember the 2nd law!!)
• Milk isn’t poison, therefore God exists, QED.

It’s a very popular fallacy. I’ll generalize it to make the mistake even clearer:

• God is the sole structure of all things
• Atheists deny the existence of God
• Absent the sole structure, the cosmos collapses instantly

This would only be true if, and only if, there wouldn’t be any other structure lying around unknown or just plainly ignored by theists that make sure that things don’t fall apart, but rather, thrive and evolve. In fact, there is nothing but hearsay to prove that God is indeed such structure.

In the fairy tale world, morals would exist apart from humans, eternally defined by God, and humans would only discover (not invent) a few bits about it from now and then because of God’s good will. Of course, there is no evidence whatsoever to the existence of these morals outside of human existence. It’s only perfectly reasonable to affirm that morals are man’s made, just like potatoes, lemons and cows are. The key word to all this is of course Evolution. There’s a reason why Dawkins is constantly evoking Darwin’s work as the most extraordinary idea ever made, and that’s because it works on almost every process that has time to generate new iterations and death to kill the bad ones. This is true in life’s evolution, it’s true on the artificial selection of the animals and vegetables that were evolved to fit our own tastes and biological needs, but it is also true in the ideas that mankind evolved.

Morality is among these ideas. The only ingredients you’ll ever need to generate morals are:

• A somewhat intelligent species
• Time
• Death

Natural Selection does the rest. It probably begins when people realize other people’s death and suffering and are able to understand that it isn’t exactly the kind of thing they desire for themselves. If they see a murder or a theft, they are able to think “what if it was against me?”, and the Golden Rule begins to generate and evolve by itself. People don’t kill because they recognize other’s as equals to them and don’t like the idea of being killed. Same as theft, treating others well, lying, etc. A society that foster these ideas thrives, the ones who don’t end up collapsing on their own.

Usually, people admire how well the world is aligned according to our needs, but the real reason isn’t obvious, due to our limited lifespan, which is that We live upon the shoulders of our ancestors’ hard work and struggle to build the structures of our world, and upon the failures of those seeking destruction, greed, and malice.

Natural Selection isn’t perfect and it won’t always choose the best option. It will choose what survives. No wonder then that irrational beliefs are just as common as the Golden Rule. One common trait is to define a certain “characteristic” of the perpetrator and generalize that people who share these characteristics are certainly just as bad, as in “The murderer killed because he was black, let’s get rid of blacks”. We can all recognize this racism, “This society suffers in the hands of the Jews”, or more subtle examples, as in “That for a nation which has attained maturity, morality is essentially dependent on the religious sanction, and that when this is rejected, morality will soon decay.”, from the Catholic Encyclopedia. The underlying message is clear, either you people bow down to God or you are eventually bound to become manic psychopaths.

Fortunately though, there is another idea that tries to really discern what’s better and what’s worse faster than Natural Selection or Religion will ever do. It’s called Reason. It dispenses with all the fairy tales and all the myths of our history. It fuels itself out of reality, to observe what is going on, to measure it, to hypothesize, test and conclude. It fuels itself from debate, battle of ideas, and a passion to discover the truth, humility and patience.

As a bonus, I leave you with other very interesting lines from the Catholic Encyclopedia, which I am sure will provoke a healthy discussion ;).

• “We may see this wherever the great revolt from Christianity, which began in the eighteenth century, and which is so potent a factor today, has spread. It is naturally in France, where the revolt began, that the movement has attained its fullest development. There its effects are not disputed. The birth-rate has shrunk until the population, were it not for the immigration of Flemings and Italians, would be a diminishing quantity; Christian family life is disappearing; the number of divorces and of suicides multiplies annually; while one of the most ominous of all symptoms is the alarming increase of juvenile crime.”
• “Without God, an absolute duty is inconceivable, because there is nobody to impose obligation. I cannot oblige myself, because I cannot be my own superior; still less can I oblige the whole human race, and yet I feel myself obliged to many things, and cannot but feel myself absolutely obliged as man, and hence cannot but regard all those who share human nature with me as obliged likewise.”
• “Thus the Greeks of classical times were in moral questions influenced rather by non-religious conceptions such as that of aidos (natural shame) than by fear of the gods; while one great religious system, namely Buddhism, explicitly taught the entire independence of the moral code from any belief in God. To these arguments we reply, first: that the savages of today are not primitives, but degenerates. It is the merest superstition to suppose that these degraded races can enlighten us as to what were the beliefs of man in his primitive state. It is among civilized races, where man has developed normally, that we must seek for knowledge as to what is natural to man.”
• “that for a nation which has attained maturity, morality is essentially dependent on the religious sanction, and that when this is rejected, morality will soon decay.”
• “We may see this wherever the great revolt from Christianity, which began in the eighteenth century, and which is so potent a factor today, has spread. It is naturally in France, where the revolt began, that the movement has attained its fullest development. There its effects are not disputed. The birth-rate has shrunk until the population, were it not for the immigration of Flemings and Italians, would be a diminishing quantity; Christian family life is disappearing; the number of divorces and of suicides multiplies annually; while one of the most ominous of all symptoms is the alarming increase of juvenile crime.”
• “Without God, an absolute duty is inconceivable, because there is nobody to impose obligation. I cannot oblige myself, because I cannot be my own superior; still less can I oblige the whole human race, and yet I feel myself obliged to many things, and cannot but feel myself absolutely obliged as man, and hence cannot but regard all those who share human nature with me as obliged likewise.”

No, not the kind of wine that makes you tipsy, but the kind that allows Windows programs to run on non-windows operating systems. With the release of Google Chrome, the new browser from Google, I was disappointed that they had failed to make a beta version for other operating systems. However, I tried running the installer in wine, only to get the following result:

fixme:advapi:CheckTokenMembership ((nil) 0×13fba0 0×33f930) stub!
fixme:process:SetProcessShutdownParameters (00000280, 00000001): partial stub.
fixme:ole:CoInitializeSecurity ((nil),-1,(nil),(nil),6,2,(nil),64,(nil)) - stub!
fixme:winhttp:WinHttpOpen ((null), 1, (null), (null), 0×0): stub

A few people managed to get it working through a few tweaks.

First, make sure you are running the latest version of wine (1.1.3 currently).

Download the offline installer of Google Chrome.

Then get the native riched20 and riched30:

wget http://kegel.com/wine/winetricks

sh ./winetricks riched20 riched30

To run Google Chrome simply execute the following command:

wine “$HOME/.wine/drive_c/windows/profiles/$USER/Local Settings/Application Data/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe” –new-http –in-process-plugins

It should also run from your Wine program directory (Applications -> Wine -> Programs -> Google Chrome) if you are running Gnome.

Just to prove it works, here is a screenshot.

It works!

Oh yeah, and I wrote this post in Google Chrome :D

It is a bit laggy and the anti-aliasing doesn’t work, but that is expected with a compatibility layer such as wine. All the main features are fast and impressive though. It gets a thumbs up from me!

This month’s book is “Biblical Nonsense” by Dr. Jason Long, and I’m thinking about scrapping the live discussion. It is fun when you get to invite the author along (as with Hemant Mehta) but otherwise it usually ends up with 2 people discussing the book for about 5 minutes, and then turning onto something else.

So the discussion for this book will simply take place over in the forums.

We need to start choosing a book for October.

Do not vote unless you wish to read the book or take part in the discussion!

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I’d also like to know who out of my readership is interested in the book club, so please make a comment if you think you’ll be able to subscribe to it regularly. I’d also love some feedback on it.