Ask the Atheist

Though it is a concern, I'm not overly concerned.

Conservatives of all sorts will be trying to add all kinds of material to the exclusion list, not just the religious ones. It'll be a battle for many different groups to keep their material available, not just the non-religious.

That said, there's always a way round. The internet outside the World Wide Web is almost completely unaffected; torrents and most bulletin boards will carry on regardless. Even banned websites can be accessed using a number of methods: mirrors, proxies, etc.

That's assuming that the new laws are actually enforced in any serious way. Going by precedent, that's not likely.

- SmartLX

Yes, let's tackle the issues which matter most to you.

Most Bible references to homosexuality are concerned only with male homosexuality, for instance Leviticus 18:22 which is addressed to a man: "Thou shall not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination."

References to lesbianism, if any are even intended, are more oblique, for instance Romans 1:26: "For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature." (Romans 1:27 goes back to talking about men.) Nevertheless, male homosexuality is universally derided and condemned in the Bible, and Christians have tended to generalise that to cover all LGBT behaviour.

The current scientific consensus on homosexuality is that it is largely hard-wired into the brain six to eight weeks after conception. All embryos start female, but at that point if there's a Y chromosome it causes a burst of testosterone which converts first the body, then the brain, to that of a man. If something interferes, a man might not get the full dose and be left with a partly feminine brain which desires men. Under other circumstances, a woman might get a small dose by mistake and have her brain partly converted, and thus desire women.

Therefore homosexual desire is not a choice. The abundance of homosexual activity in the rest of the animal kingdom demonstrates that it doesn't even require the ability to make a fully reasoned choice. It's instinct.

Homosexual activity, on the other hand, is a choice as much as any sexual activity is. That brings us to the question of whether homosexual activity is a sin to Christians. Even if you ignore the direct condemnation throughout the Bible, all sex outside of marriage is sinful. According to most denominations marriage is by definition between a man and a woman. Thus homosexuals can never marry their desired partners, and any sex they might enjoy is sinful. Their only sinless choice is celibacy, or else reluctant marriages to the opposite sex.

This is the problem right here. Why has God supposedly created people who can never be sexually fulfilled without damning themselves? Why does marriage, the only haven for sinless sex, exclude them?

Some Christians respond to this, and to gay rights campaigns, by attempting to prove that even homosexual desire is a choice by converting gays into straights. This is the impetus behind the whole "ex-gay" movement. The success rate of these programs is abysmal; since all the subjects are doing is suppressing their natural urges, they are tremendously likely to "relapse". Even the instructors, most of them "ex-gays" themselves, are regularly in the news after being caught having gay affairs.

While homosexuality is not the expected norm for a human being, it's hardly unnatural. It's not your choice, it's not your fault and it's not something you can truly change. You and those around you are just going to have to live with it. Fortunately, if you meet the right woman you can live happily thanks to it.

- SmartLX

A few reasons.

- I get free on-the-job training in written debate, research and effective writing in general, with rapid feedback if I do badly.

- I'm relatively new to atheism, and I'm crash-testing it. I'm actively seeking the best arguments against it to see whether I've missed something obvious. Nothing so far.

- Many religious folks paint a really horrid picture of atheism and atheists themselves. That reflects badly on me and any of my friends and family who are atheists. I want anyone who's genuinely curious about atheism to be able to ask an atheist about it directly, and set the record straight.

- You call this conforming to morals and customs? I spend half the time here explaining to people why I don't conform to their doctrines.

- SmartLX

Sure, atheists fight amongst themselves as much as any other group. Not everybody likes the RRS, for instance. The difference from religions is, we can't resort to schisms in order to draw clear battle lines. When it happens, we respond like people do in any non-religious argument. We reply, we rebut, or we rebuke. Sometimes, unfortunately, we retaliate. We're human.

Everybody knows that people will sometimes attack and betray each other...including the authors of the Bible. Passages like those you mention use the observational fact of constant human conflict. All the authors do is predict based on their own observation that it will continue, in other words human behaviour will not change in the forseeable future, any more than it had in the thousands of years of history available to the authors. I argue that the Bible is wrong in many of its claims, but nobody's saying there isn't a single true word in it.

Approaching this prediction using my new reference post on prophecies and predictions, it fits squarely into the first suggestion: High Probability of Success. It is indeed an implicit prediction, and it is correct so far, but it was pretty darn easy to guess. Did it really need to be divinely inspired to be accurate?

- SmartLX

I'm honoured to help. I think I can be properly impartial, because I don't agree with either of you; I don't believe in free will at all. We can do what we want, but we can't choose what to want.

Just a quick note before I begin - isn't "Christian theist" partly tautological? Is it possible to be a Christian and either a deist or an atheist? How would a person of either combination reconcile the supposed miracles of Christ?

Plus, a quick glossary for those not used to this kind of discussion: omni-max means omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent and omni-benevolent all at once, as Christians claim God is. P1, P2, etc. are premises from which conclusion C is derived. If the combined P doesn't lead to the C, it's a bad argument.

You can do better than an unknown hypothetical OM/FW harmoniser. There are known hypotheticals out there. For free will to exist, let's go large and say it must be possible for any human to make any choice at any time, even if that choice may not agree with a god. One solution which also allows an omni-max god is that all choices agree with that god; the nature of benevolence is that all human choices, regardless of the suffering they may cause, are ultimately beneficial. The god has used its infinite mind and intuition to predict all possible futures, and has found (or declared) all of them to be good. This is a potential solution to the Problem of Evil as well.

Therefore I don't think there's a deductive path to a contradiction between an omni-max god and free will, so if you're going to argue it anyway evidential and probabilistic arguments are the way to go.

To add my own spin, the fact that there are answers to the tough questions like supposed free will and the Problem of Evil does not help Christianity as much as you'd think. The problem is that there are too many answers coming from the one religion. The PoE is the better-known example. Answers to that can involve exempt demons, free will, "mysterious ways" and the nature of evil itself. It would sound better if Christians settled on one answer, because the current multitude demonstrates that nobody actually knows.

- SmartLX

No, it's not true, but I can see how the deist fellow might get that idea.

Laws against discrimination on the basis of religion extend to cover atheists. That's not because atheism is officially a religion, but because there are additional clauses in the laws to include those with no religion.

If atheism really were classified as a religion, atheist organisations could apply for the same tax exemptions as churches. As it is, the best they can do is get recognised as non-profit charities, like the secular Red Cross.

- SmartLX

This is an argument I've been answering constantly ever since I started here. No matter how many times it comes up, there are always those who think it's a brand new, ingenious zinger which will take us by surprise. I'll address it once more and then refer back to here in future.

There are four main issues with the Wager, any one of which would render it nonsensical or inadequate.

1. It presents a false dilemma: that either God exists or no god does.

There is an obvious third option, namely that any deity besides the expected god exists. If the real deity is Thor, for example, the punishment for Christians is infinite (possibly worse than for atheists, who at least do not worship a rival god).

Humans have imagined something like 20,000 different major deities or equivalents so far. Together with the countless ones we haven't thought of yet, there are an infinite number of possible gods. Without evidence for any particular god, all gods share equal probability of practically zero, and the probability of a particular god existing is infinitesimal compared to the probability of one or more rival gods, so worshipping any god is a hugely bad bet.

The response to this, I know, is to argue that there is evidence for your particular god and not for any of the others. That's a valid response, if true. However, if you have proof positive that your god is the one and only there's no need to mess around with probabilities, so you don't need to use Pascal's Wager in the first place. Just push your evidence instead.

2. If there are no gods, you don't lose nothing by living as if there is one. You lose plenty.

You spend hundreds or thousands of hours attending religious services. You give money to organisations whose primary purpose is not to help people but to convert them. You prevent yourself from doing some things you enjoy, not because they hurt anyone but because a book told you to. And so on.

3. Belief in gods is not a choice.

A person either believes there's a god or doesn't. This may change, but it's not a conscious decision by the person. Her or she has to be convinced, or else no longer convinced, one way or the other. The idea that it's beneficial to believe in a god does not support the idea that there is one. They're two independent issues.

4. Any decent god would spot a faker.

This is related to the third point. If an atheist were convinced that it's beneficial to believe in and worship God, he or she could certainly worship, but would still not believe. The worship would therefore be insincere on a fundamental level. It'd be a farce, maintained to give the appearance of belief. Would the Christian god, for example, accept this lip service?

It's said by some religious folks that if you pray with doubt, but pray with sincerity, belief will come. I don't doubt it; if you pray as if there's a god there for long enough, you may manage to forget that there isn't. If brainwashing yourself like this is the only way to believe, however, are you really doing the right thing?

In short, Pascal's Wager uses an incomplete and incorrect premise, and is useless to nonbelievers even if they agree with it. Blaise Pascal was a brilliant mathematician to whom we are all indebted, but his apologetic really let him down. Let this one go, people.

- SmartLX