Nina Rose Nava, who went to school with Kelley, said: “He was always talking about how people who believe in God were stupid and trying to preach his atheism.’...”--NY Times
Posted on 11/14/2017 9:54:10 AM PST by Heartlander
Recently a man burst into a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and shot and killed 26 parishioners (including an unborn child). The killer’s former high school classmates described him as a militant atheist.
“He was always talking about how people who believe in God we’re stupid and trying to preach his atheism,” wrote former classmate Nina Rose Nava in a Facebook post, according to the Daily Mail. “I legit just deleted him off my fb cause I couldn’t stand his post.”
Which raises this question: To what extent was the killer’s rampage inspired by his atheist beliefs? Obviously, I am not making the case that atheists as a group condone his act, or would ever consider doing anything like it. All decent, normal people, atheist and theist alike, are horrified by this atrocity. Yet the question posed is still reasonable. If the tables had been turned — if, God forbid many times over, the victims had been atheists at a skeptics’ convention and the killer had been an evangelical Christian — the public square would be filled with speculation about the role that ideology played in his crimes. And properly so. We can’t get inside the Texas killer’s head (fortunately), but ideas do have consequences.
If you’re looking for reflection on the killer’s motives, don’t waste your time looking on atheist blogs, not least the ones with a focus on promoting evolution. Jerry Coyne mentions it briefly, with no meditations on why a fellow militant atheist would murder Christians. Larry Moran says not a word. Militant atheist Jeff Shallit posted nothing. Panda’s Thumb, a group blog devoted to atheism’s creation myth, put up a post mocking creationist Ken Ham the day before the shooting. Nothing since. The Richard Dawkins Foundation merely posted ridicule of House Speaker Paul Ryan’s request for prayers. Sam Harris, who has written that “some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them,” said nothing about a fellow atheist who killed people for their beliefs.
P.Z. Myers did mention the mass murder — in order to mock the Christians who were slaughtered by his co-(ir)religionist, while ridiculing a Lutheran pastor who sought to comprehend the terrible event:
This is a tragedy, and it’s a little unfair to chastise the dead for the failure of their faith. I could agree that maybe this is an appropriate time for empathy, rather than mockery. But wait… [.] So those dead church-goers were praying for God to kill them? Dude, that is f***** up. If it’s bad for atheists to mock the sincerity of the faithful, it’s also bad to pretend that the deceased were praying for their demise, and God was being nice by sending a gunman to blow them away…Twenty six people were killed on Sunday. So we can expect them to rise from the dead on, oh, Tuesday? Was the terror a necessary part of their “rescue” into heaven? The blood and pain and fear? This Jesus guy is one evil, nasty character…. We already know that God’s aim is terrible, but now you’re telling me someone could pray to get over their cold, and God will interpret that to mean he should deliver them out of this evil world and into his heavenly glory with a bullet to the brain?
This is a theme with militant atheist bloggers: They preach an ideology responsible for more violence than any known to man, and they excoriate theists for the atrocities committed in God’s name. But, when it comes to atheist atrocities, militant atheists are silent.
Many atheists argue that atrocities by atheists don’t count, because they were not committed “in the name of atheism.” The Sutherland Springs murders put the lie to that claim, as if the tens of millions murdered during the past century explicitly in the name of atheism weren’t enough. As Jesuit Edward Oakes notes wryly: “So it’s not atheism that’s the problem, only atheists!”
The problem that atheists have with reflection on their own beliefs is that they don’t (with a few exceptions) take their own atheism seriously.
So, let’s do it for them. If atheism is true, the following are true:
I’m sure you can add a few more necessary items to the Atheist Nicene Creed.
When you consider the Sutherland Springs killer’s motives — including his hatred of Christians — it’s obvious how his atheist belief provided the grease to turn his hate into action. What does he have to fear? When he is dead (it was clearly a suicide mission), he will have no pain, no suffering, no accounting, according to atheist beliefs.
If you wonder why militant atheists of a more docile variety (needless to say, the vast, vast majority in our society) don’t contemplate the atrocities of their less docile co-(ir)religionists, this is one reason: Any honest reflection on atheist belief would make it very clear that atheism, taken seriously, offers no reason not to kill innocents that you hate. Atheism is much more than disbelief in gods. Atheism is the explicit denial of objective morality and the explicit denial of ultimate accountability.
This is the reason that atheism is the most violent ideology in human history: some atheists take atheism seriously.
A few quotes from the aforementioned regarding their worldview:
"If a person doesn't think that there is a God to be accountable to, then what's the point of trying to modify your behavior to keep it within acceptable ranges? That's how I thought anyway. I always believed the theory of evolution as the truth, that we all just came from the slime. When we died, you know, that was it, there is nothing”…
- Jeffrey Dahmer
__________________
"Life is just a meaningless coincidence… result of long process of evolution and many several factors, causes and effects. However, life is also something that an individual wants and determines it to be. And I’m the dictator and god of my own life. And me, I have chosen my way. I am prepared to fight and die for my cause. I, as a natural selector, will eliminate all who I see unfit, disgraces of human race and failures of natural selection."
“…No mercy for the scum of the Earth! Humanity is overrated. It’s time to put natural selection and survival of the fittest back on track.”
- Pekka-Eric Auvinen
__________________
“YOU KNOW WHAT I LOVE??? Natural SELECTION! It’s the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms . . . but it’s all natural! YES!”
“…NATURAL SELECTION. Kill the retards.”
- Eric Harris
__________________
“Then I learned that all moral judgments are ‘value judgments,’ that all value judgments are subjective [it just depends on how you think about them], and that none can be proved to be either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’……I discovered that to become truly free, truly unfettered, I had to become truly uninhibited. And I quickly discovered that the greatest obstacle to my freedom, the greatest block and limitation to it, consists in the insupportable “value judgment that I was bound to respect the rights of others. I asked myself, who were these ‘others?’ Other human beings with human rights? Why is it more wrong to kill a human animal than any other animal, a pig or a sheep or a steer? Is your life more to you than a hog’s life to a hog? Why should I be willing to sacrifice my pleasure more for the one than for the other? Surely, you would not, in this age of scientific enlightenment, declare that God or nature has marked some pleasures as ‘moral’ or ‘good’ and others as ‘immoral’ or ‘bad’?
In any case, let me assure you, my dear young lady, that there is absolutely no comparison between the pleasure I might take in eating ham and the pleasure I anticipate in raping and murdering you. That is the honest conclusion to which my education has led me – after the most conscientious examination of my spontaneous and uninhibited self.”
- Ted Bundy
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SEE ALSO: Communism’s War on Religion
“Take us Atheists seriously — or we will send more killers to your churches until you do.”
Nina Rose Nava, who went to school with Kelley, said: “He was always talking about how people who believe in God were stupid and trying to preach his atheism.’...”--NY Times
anybody else wonder why atheists always spend so much time talking about God?
Yet atheism is a faith-based belief as well. How do they know, beyond a doubt, that there isn’t a god?
They don’t, any more than you know there are no unicorns, tooth fairies, or spaghetti monsters.
I travel for work every week with my boss, an atheist.
Yep, according to his weekly “sermon (tirade)”, Anyone who believes in God is a “F$#@!ing idiot and isn’t fit to have any rights -because they are so stupid...
He’s also a Bernie supporter, so...
“anybody else wonder why atheists always spend so much time talking about God?”
LOL, yeah!!
Say, I want to start a “stamp out Santa Claus” society!! Cos it’s not enough that I don’t believe in him, I need to stop all the morons out there who DO!!! LOL...
If you get know know them, you’ll find a trauma somewhere back in their life experience, where God didn’t give them what they wanted. Sorry folks, bad things happen to EVERYONE. Nobody gets out alive.
Then was this an example of a “radicalized atheist”? Was it a group effort or did he radicalize himself?
They don’t, any more than you know there are no unicorns, tooth fairies, or spaghetti monsters.
True, but it is infinitely more likely that some sort of god or creator exists than any fairytale-type critters.
And the question of God, thus understood, is one that is ineradicably present in the mystery of existence itself, or of consciousness, or of truth, goodness, and beauty. It is also the question that philosophical naturalism is supposed to have answered exhaustively in the negative, without any troubling explanatory lacunae, and that therefore any aspiring philosophical naturalist must understand in order to be an atheist in any intellectually significant way.Well, as I say, this should not be all that difficult to grasp. And yet any speaker at one of those atheist revivalist meetings need only trot out either of two reliable witticisms—“I believe neither in God nor in the fairies at the bottom of my garden” or “Everyone today is a disbeliever in Thor or Zeus, but we simply believe in one god less”—to elicit warmly rippling palpitations of self-congratulatory laughter from the congregation. Admittedly, one ought not judge a movement by its jokes, but neither should one be overly patient with those who delight in their own ignorance of elementary conceptual categories. I suppose, though, that the charitable course is to state the obvious as clearly as possible.
So: Beliefs regarding fairies concern a certain kind of object that may or may not exist within the world, and such beliefs have much the same sort of intentional and rational shape as beliefs regarding the neighbors over the hill or whether there are such things as black swans. Beliefs regarding God concern the source and end of all reality, the unity and existence of every particular thing and of the totality of all things, the ground of the possibility of anything at all. Fairies and gods, if they exist, occupy something of the same conceptual space as organic cells, photons, and the force of gravity, and so the sciences might perhaps have something to say about them, if a proper medium for investigating them could be found.
God, by contrast, is the infinite actuality that makes it possible for photons and (possibly) fairies to exist, and so can be “investigated” only, on the one hand, by acts of logical deduction and conjecture or, on the other, by contemplative or spiritual experiences. Belief or disbelief in fairies or gods could never be validated by philosophical arguments made from first principles; the existence or nonexistence of Zeus is not a matter that can be intelligibly discussed in the categories of modal logic or metaphysics, any more than the existence of tree frogs could be; if he is there at all, one must go on an expedition to find him.
The question of God, by contrast, is one that must be pursued in terms of the absolute and the contingent, the necessary and the fortuitous, act and potency, possibility and impossibility, being and nonbeing, transcendence and immanence. Evidence for or against the existence of Thor or King Oberon would consist only in local facts, not universal truths of reason; it would be entirely empirical, episodic, psychological, personal, and hence elusive. Evidence for or against the reality of God, if it is there, pervades every moment of the experience of existence, every employment of reason, every act of consciousness, every encounter with the world around us.
All of which is to say (to return to where I began) that it is absurd to think that one can profess atheism in any meaningful way without thereby assenting to an entire philosophy of being, however inchoate one’s sense of it may be. The philosophical naturalist’s view of reality is not one that merely fails to find some particular object within the world that the theist imagines can be descried there; it is a very particular representation of the nature of things, entailing a vast range of purely metaphysical commitments.
Principally, it requires that one believe that the physical order, which both experience and reason say is an ensemble of ontological contingencies, can exist entirely of itself, without any absolute source of actuality. It requires also that one resign oneself to an ultimate irrationalism: For the one reality that naturalism can never logically encompass is the very existence of nature (nature being, by definition, that which already exists); it is a philosophy, therefore, surrounded, permeated, and exceeded by a truth that is always already super naturam, and yet a philosophy that one cannot seriously entertain except by scrupulously refusing to recognize this.
It is the embrace of an infinite paradox: the universe understood as an “absolute contingency.” It may not amount to a metaphysics in the fullest sense, since strictly speaking it possesses no rational content—it is, after all, a belief that all things rest upon something like an original moment of magic—but it is certainly far more than the mere absence of faith.
- David Bentley Hart
You left out part of it. Here’s how the rest goes.
“Everyone today is a disbeliever in Thor or Zeus, but we simply believe in one god less” than you belive in. When you understand why you don’t believe in all those other gods, you’ll understand why I don’t believe in yours.
‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
- Francis Crick
Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly. 1) No gods worth having exist; 2) no life after death exists; 3) no ultimate foundation for ethics exists; 4) no ultimate meaning in life exists; and 5) human free will is nonexistent.
- William Provine
It starts by giving up an active deity, then it gives up the hope that there is any life after death. When you give those two up, the rest of it follows fairly easily. You give up the hope that there is an imminent morality. And finally, there’s no human free will. If you believe in evolution, you can’t hope for there being any free will. There’s no hope whatsoever in there being any deep meaning in life. We live, we die, and we’re gone.
- William Provine (RIP)
Free will is an illusion. Our wills are simply not of our own making…. We do not have the freedom we think we have. I cannot determine my wants…. My mental life is given to me by the cosmos. People feel (or presume) an authorship of their thoughts and actions that is illusory. What I will do next, and why, remains, at bottom, a mystery—one that is fully determined by the prior state of the universe and the laws of nature (including the contributions of chance). You will do whatever it is you do, and it is meaningless to assert that you could have done otherwise.
- Sam Harris, Free Will
To a survival machine, another survival machine (which is not its own child or another close relative) is part of its environment, like a rock or a river or a lump of food. It is something that gets in the way, or something that can be exploited. It differs from a rock or a river in one important respect; it is inclined to hit back. This is because it too is a machine that holds its immortal genes in trust for the future, and it too will stop at nothing to preserve them.
- Richard Dawkins, The Selfisf Gene (where he proclaims humans are “survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve selfish molecules known as genes.”)
[A]n individual cannot be held responsible for either his genes or his environment. From this simple analysis, surely it follows that individuals cannot logically be held responsible for their behavior.
- Anthony Cashmore, biologist at the University of Pennsylvania
[Y]ou are robots made out of meat, which is what I’m going to try to convince you of today. Our behavior is absolutely determined by the laws of physics. Why did I get out of bed this morning? I thought, I hope to persuade people, and that was determined by the laws of physics. …Even our very desire to try to change people’s minds. The fact that I’m up here trying to do this is determined by my own, you know, physical constitution and environment. That is the infinite regress and the sort of annoying thing about determinism. It’s turtles all the way down.Are their beliefs a lot of ‘hooey’? We've been through this before...
- Jerry Coyne’s lecture at the Imagine No Religion convention
Do you really think I’m reading all your boilerplate?
Jeez.
It’s not boilerplate – if you bothered to follow the link you’d see it’s an unanswered question posed to you and created for you…
Blocks and blocks of text are boilerplate.
Anyone can cut and paste. We’re done here.
“6.There is no objective morality “
Therein lies the atheists creed: Anarchy.
Three men walking:
One man walks up to me, and I ask him to jump. He does.
A second man walks up to me, but different from the first, as he is walking in the air. I ask him, also, to jump. He tries, but cannot, because he is not grounded.
A third man walks up to me, but different from either of the first two, as he is walking on the ground, but doesn’t believe in the ground. He believes the ground does not exist. I ask him to jump too. He does.
__________
Now, when the theist says you don’t have morality, like I’m saying, you think we are claiming you are the second guy. But you want to say, “No! You idiot! I can jump just fine.” And you can. But we are not saying you are the second guy at all. Rather, we are saying you are the third guy. You have, in actuality and practicality, the correct moral standards from which you CAN jump, and you KNOW you have them.
But the problem remains, and it really is a problem that is delusional. You have the ground, you use the ground, you run and jump and play all day long. But you deny that which is right under your feet even as you are doing it.
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