Question from Chris:
I have a friend who I just found out does not approve of equality for homosexuals, doesn’t believe in the majority of science (mainly evolution and plate tectonics), and also makes really ignorant and pretentious comments about stuff he clearly knows nothing about. I see him everyday, at least twice, and have a raging deisre inside me to say something back to him, what do I do?
Answer by SmartLX:
The obvious answer would be to actually say something back to him. You didn’t say why you haven’t done it already; care to comment and elaborate?
Generally speaking, if you want to challenge someone’s position on something, attack the position and not the person. You say this person is largely ignorant of the things he discusses; well, the simplest antidote to that is education. See how he reacts to a bit of evidence, there’s plenty around. Let us know if you want a bit of guidance in your own research.
I can be much more specific if you are, so go ahead and say what’s going on and what you need. From what you’ve said so far, I doubt your friend would read this site and find your writings. That said, you could even encourage him to write in with his own questions and/or challenges. If you warn us first, we can erase your stuff so he won’t see it. Just let us know how we can help.
Afraid and lonely? It happens.
Question from Josh:
I am a somewhat new atheist. I recently finished leaving the fold and feel that I am now very much deconverted in this long drawn out process. However, no matter how many books I read about how hell was invented later I still have a small fear of it in the back of my mind. I was wondering if you had a similiar experience or had advice. Also I am feeling very lonely since deconverting it seems as if it gets harder and harder to find secular friends as an atheist. I feel I have to keep this hidden about myself.
Answer by SmartLX:
Welcome to faithdrawal, Josh. I didn’t invent it, but I did come up with the name. The fears and anxieties instilled in you by your indoctrination (including the fear of Hell) will outlast the core beliefs on which they’re based, possibly by a long time. Such is the nature of psychology and emotion. Be assured, however, that as long as you don’t relapse into the beliefs themselves, you will feel better and less afraid as time goes on. (The opposite happened to me; after not seriously thinking about religion for over a decade, all the associated emotions had faded and no longer supported the beliefs. I mostly base my concept of faithdrawal on what people have told me in their questions.)
You haven’t said where you’re from or where you’re living, but it can certainly be problematic or even downright dangerous to identify yourself as an atheist in some places. That said, there are few places in the world where you’re likely to be entirely alone in your atheism. Think about it: if you feel you have to keep it hidden, other atheists around you probably feel they have to hide it too, including from you. A community sometimes needs a few brave folks to “come out” before the rest will be open about it. I’m not necessarily encouraging you to do this, I’m just acknowledging that it would take courage, and for good reason.
While you’re waiting for the local atheist contingent to hit that “critical mass”, you can look for local groups with “Atheist”, “Humanist”, “Secular” and/or “Freethinker” in the title. If you’re in America, for example, American Atheists and the Secular Student Alliance are all over the place these days. If you’re in Great Britain, look for the British Humanist Association. If you comment and say where you are, even to within a state or equivalent, we might be able to help with this.
Cheer up, it seriously only seems like you’re alone.
Answer Me These Questions Three
Question from Stephen:
Dear who ever is reading this,
I am a Christian, now before you get all mad and make judgements please hear me out I just want to ask you a few questions so I get what you believe. Okay so…
1. If you don’t believe in “God” do you believe in a “higher power?” And if you do who is that “higher power?” Would you consider yourself to be “God” over your own life?
2. If you don’t believe in heaven then where do you go when you die?
3. How do you believe the world came to be? Though the Big Bang theory? Or did the earth always exist?
Please respond back with your answers I just want to know more about atheists.
Answer by SmartLX:
No problem Stephen. If I got mad when someone simply identified as Christian, I wouldn’t be able to think straight when answering their questions. I’ve numbered your questions for easy reference.
1. Plenty of entities are more powerful than me. The sun makes me look completely insignificant, when considered in all its enormity. The nation of the Commonwealth of Australia has power over me, since I’m a small part of it. Gravity, while not necessarily an entity, has achieved more than I ever will. The thing is that none of these entities are concerned with the intimate details of how I live my life, so they’re not the kind of “higher power” I can appeal to for practical help in all things. (My country does concern itself with some broad aspects of my life, of course, but fortunately not all.)
Therefore I don’t think there is the kind of “higher power” you’re thinking of. In the absence of this, I certainly don’t feel like the God of my own life because I don’t have anything like that kind of absolute control over it. I do have some control, obviously, but that just makes me a functioning person with my own will, not a god. It suffices.
2. I described my position on death in an earlier piece. Read it here, and comment (here or there) if you have any questions.
3. All the evidence points to a Big Bang, or a similar expansion of all existing matter and energy from a single point in space about 15 billion years ago. The Earth formed about 10 billion years later, coming together from materials orbiting the Sun (which had formed a few hundred million years earlier). You don’t have to be an atheist to think this, and in fact many Christians believe that God caused exactly this to happen. Where atheists differ is that they don’t believe a god was required for it to happen.
You Down With O.T.G?
Question from Joseph:
Hey, I’m an undergrad at a Christian college and my major is Biblical studies. I was raised an evangelical Christian but have been an agnostic for about a year now.
I have a lot of respect for the Bible and think it is under-studied and under-appreciated by atheists.
Anyways, here is one question I’ve thought about. If the OT prophets were misinformed and delivered messages from a figment of their imagination, then why were their messages so self-critical of their people and generally doom-and-gloom messages? You would think if someone wanted to imagine a God, they would make him a lot more compassionate and less vengeful and jealous. Also, where the heck did they actually get their oracles from? Most people don’t discourse with their imaginations to the point of writing out lengthy books about them. The prophets also performed object lessons to demonstrate God’s messages. For example, Ezekiel laid on his side for over a year!
The prophets also predicted a lot of events (usually vague, but still…) that came true. I wonder if this is the same type of trick that fortune tellers use, where they give a vague answer that will inevitably be manifested at some point in time, while those with a confirmation bias will end up being convinced of divine foreknowledge. But some of the prophecies were quite specific…where did the prophets come up with these?
Answer by SmartLX:
To address a couple of things very quickly:
– The Bible is classical literature, certainly. Like all classical literature it’s underappreciated as such in today’s world, and not just by atheists. That said, given that atheists reject the central claims of the Bible, they’re not usually motivated to delve into the nitty-gritty. See my piece on theology.
– Someone advocating the fulfilment of a prophecy wants you to consider only two possibilities: that it was pure coincidence and an impossibly lucky guess, or it was genuine divinely bestowed foreknowledge. There are many other possibilities, some of which I’ve named and numbered in my earlier piece on prophecies.
Now as for the character of God in the Old Testament, let’s continue to assume that the stories were made up, as you posit, for the sake of argument. God does not have a likeable personality because the purpose of the stories is clearly not to make people feel good. (There’d be a lot less genocide in it if that were the case, for one thing.) The purpose of the stories is to inspire awe and fear of God, to influence people’s behaviour as per the Commandments (not just the Ten, either) and to drive people to spread the Word. Like in any narrative, the characters need to be what they are for the author to deliver his or her message, not just for their own sake.
You do get the impression that people did some extraordinary things to receive their messages from God and to get the books written, but that doesn’t really speak for their veracity. Some of their actions, like Ezekiel’s marathon reclining session, could be exaggerated accounts themselves – or even if they’re genuine they could have degraded these people’s mental states to the point where they heard from the God of their day without any real divine communication at all.
We’ll never really know what happened to people like Ezekiel, but an extraordinary story hardly warrants jumping straight to a specific supernatural explanation.
Quantum Golden Ratios. Whoa.
Question from Bill:
Why is the golden ratio found in the human body, DNA, the human genome, and in subatomic particles?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100107143909.htm
A pattern couldn’t just be found anywhere in the quantum world. So how do atheists respond to this?
Answer by SmartLX:
As I explained earlier, it is very simple to produce a Fibonacci sequence and therefore a golden ratio of 1.618 through basic, repeated, natural occurrences such as cell division, which is why it’s so common in biology. The fact that the same appears to occur in quantum mechanics in a specific case suggests that the underlying physical mechanisms that produce these effects may make use of similar recursions.
The key thing about the golden ratio is that it’s an emergent phenomenon. Like evolution, it emerges as a result when the starting conditions of a system happen to be conducive to it. Only after it’s happened do we notice the pattern; whatever the system is, it just looks like it’s going about its business until the effect appears. There’s no guidance and no direction necessary, it just happens – and it was already known to be so common that its emergence in the mysterious quantum world, though fascinating, is not that surprising. It says no more about the existence of a god than any other instance of a golden ratio, so atheists will respond with the same sort of interest as everyone else.
Why For You Gotta Do That?
Question from Jake:
I would like to get out of the way I’m a Christian. I would like to know if there’s a code or something saying atheists need to ridicule religious people? I’m just fine that you’re an atheist because I believe God gave us free will so we should let everybody do what they want. I try not to be ignorant like a lot of Christians (I know you probably think I’m already because I beleive there’s a god but I try to know all the facts and things like that). I don’t condemn evolution as something the devil made up and in my opinion it might’ve been the way god made all the animals.
Answer by SmartLX:
There is no atheist code, period. Not believing in gods does not automatically mean you have to try and stop others from believing, or make fun of the religious, or do anything else for that matter. People who ridicule believers do so for their own reasons.
That said, many atheists do believe the religious would be better off if they no longer believed (and the non-religious would be better off if they were more numerous). It’s that idea that drives them to challenge religious beliefs. Ridiculing religious people directly is usually misguided and ultimately ineffective, but the beliefs themselves are fair game like any other idea. If they are well supported, believers should be able to defend them from attacks. If not, perhaps the beliefs are not worth holding.
You’re a Christian, so I realise that you think everyone needs to “get right with God” so they can go to Heaven. This may drive you to proselytise when you can, or discuss your faith with outsiders, or at least pray for souls to be saved and minds to be changed. You ultimately think atheists would be better off as Christians, regardless of how pro-active you are in that area. You likely also realise that some Christians go about converting people in dubious ways, such as violating constitutional separation of church and state or physically attacking those of other religions. I don’t assume that you condone these actions unless you say you do.
Likewise, some atheists can be dicks about it. Not everything done or said by every atheist is condoned by all atheists. If you want to know my opinion on a particular action or statement, whether actual or hypothetical, comment and ask or just look through what I’ve already written.
It’s Not Easy Being Atheist
Question from Sam:
I consider my being a atheist and believing nature is our creator there is no spiritual force creation to this galaxy. I feel that when I converted to atheism during late 2010 everyone doesn’t respect me at all because my religon is not the same as everyone else’s. I have so many connections with atheists who understand me well. But why I gotta be hated and I could care less if I am but why are they targeting my belief?
Answer by SmartLX:
There are a few major reasons why certain believers dislike atheists as a group, and deride atheism as a position.
Firstly and most obviously, it is indeed not the same as their religion, so the very existence of atheists implies that there are those who think their beliefs are misguided. Simply being an atheist can be seen as attacking religion, even if you never say another word against it. (Presuppositionalists and some others get around this by presupposing that self-proclaimed atheists are secretly believers, and there’s no such thing as a true atheist.)
Secondly, many believers are very confident (from being constantly reassured) that scripture and religious apologists have made a very strong case for the existence of a god. Atheists, they reason, are either willingly ignorant of theology or don’t understand the arguments, which speaks poorly for the intelligence of all atheists.
Thirdly, people who believe in the major gods also believe that those gods are the source of many other things: love, logic, conscience, purpose in life and so on. Based on this premise, atheists lack these things, and if they really thought about it all atheists should be miserable, nihilistic and amoral. Some even think that although we don’t believe in God, we do think there’s a Devil, and we worship him.
Now, as an atheist, you know all of this is wrong. You know that you really don’t believe in a god, that the arguments in favour of one are not so overwhelming, that love and purpose can come from other places and that if there’s no God then there’s no Satan either. If everyone saw you the way you see yourself, you wouldn’t get the same disrespect from believers, but the fact is that some of them see you very differently. A major reason why I run this site is to correct just these types of misconceptions about atheists, if only so we get the respect we deserve merely as functioning human beings. If you can help someone better understand what an atheist really is and isn’t, even in a small way, it will advance the cause.
Why Mohammed?
Question from Ali:
I was asking a friend if God wanted to reveal Islam to all humans why was it in Arabic? He answered me because he chose Mohammed as his prophet. Then I asked why of all the people he chose an illiterate man? They answered me because that is the miracle and how he showed his divine powers of making an illiterate man able to read and write instantly. So i got stuck on that thought and couldn’t answer because it made some sense… if you have a supporting argument for me to continue that conversation please advise me…
Thanks.
Answer by SmartLX:
It would have made more sense for God to reveal himself in multiple places, in all major languages, with a consistent message for mankind. Therefore I don’t think much of the supposed decision to send a message to just one person in any single language, let alone Arabic. That said, if that was how it had to happen, Arabic was as good a language as any – less for its popularity than for the fact that it was spoken by many groups with aggressive warriors who were ideal for spreading Islam by the sword.
Not all Muslims believe that God bestowed literacy upon Mohammed (peace be upon him, as they say). This Muslim site doesn’t say anything about him ever learning to read or write. There’s a third opinion too: a separate site (written by a non-Muslim) gives a quote from the “writings” of Mohammed himself which implies that he was always able to read.
It hardly matters, because as the first link says it’s perfectly reasonable to think that Mohammed dictated his works to his companions, at least a few of whom were surely literate. Oral storytelling and other communication has a strong tradition in the Middle East, and even today Muslims are encouraged to memorise chunks of the Quran for recital (and, of course, simply for the sake of indoctrination). It’s the simplest explanation for a large body of written work coming from an illiterate man, and it even satisfies some Muslims. There’s still the supernatural claim that the angel Gabriel (Jibril) provided much of the material to Mohammed beforehand, but his literacy is irrelevant to that issue.
Take all of the above into account, and the idea of Mohammed’s sudden literacy makes very poor Muslim apologetic when there are so many other – and so much more mundane – things that could have happened instead.
The Importance of Evidence
Question from Charles:
Dear Friends,
Something I’ve tended to notice is the overwhelming urge most atheists need to have objective evidence of God’s existence, prior to any personal commitment on their behalf of acknowledging such a deity as an Almighty God.
1. Can you conclusively prove that God doesn’t exist, anywhere in the universe?
2. If such a deity did exist, would you recognize Him as such? What shape and form would He have to possess?
3. Once you’ve recognized Him as God, would you be willing to totally acknowledge Him as God – to concede your free will to His?
Answer by SmartLX:
Well, wouldn’t you want good reason to think something was real before you based your whole life around it? In what other situation do you completely devote yourself to someone without knowing that it’s the right thing to do? If you’ve done this, what are your reasons?
1. You can’t prove a universal negative without being omniscient, so no. That said, you can in principle establish something as unlikely, and I’ve had a go at doing that with gods here.
2. Perhaps such a deity does exist, but I’d have to sense His, Her or Its presence or actions in some way before I could recognise Him, Her or It. God in many people’s opinion has no physical form so there’s really nothing to go on; I think a god would be more recognisable through its influence on reality than through its appearance.
3. If I knew God existed, and I knew what He actually wanted from me, I’d give it to Him. I’d be stupid not to, because if He’s anything like the Abrahamic religions portray Him then He’s a tyrant who punishes people forever – in other words, far out of proportion to anything they could possibly have done wrong in life. I wouldn’t be happy about it, but I’d toe the line like a good little serf.
Nature’s Law
Question from Jason:
Hi,
I am an atheist. I have a question and I want your help to figure it out.
Why is Nature’s Law unchangeable?
Answer by SmartLX:
The question could mean one of a few different things, but in any case we don’t know.
If you mean that the laws of physics and the fundamental constants of the universe can’t be changed, this is hardly surprising. We observe the same physical forces having the same kinds of effects wherever we look in the universe, so they really do appear to be universal and fundamental. We’ve got no way to even try to change any of them even if we wanted to, and we wouldn’t want to because it would probably kill us all in very interesting ways.
If you mean the idea handed down from Aristotle that human nature, and morality in particular, is essentially unchangeable and comes from within all of us, this is only partly right but the part that’s right is easily explained. We all share certain hereditary instincts, and most of us have been brought up in cultures and communities which are very similar in certain respects, so it’s very likely that we’ll develop some shared sense of ethics. In some cases, however, we differ wildly in a way no common bestower of morals would have intended. See the wide range of opinions on abortion, euthanasia and welfare for example.
If you mean that the song Nature’s Law by English band Embrace is unchangeable, get over it. They’ve recorded it already and they’re unlikely to rework it anytime soon.