When Atheists Attack (Each Other)

The squabble between Darwin lobbyists who openly hate religion and those who only quietly disdain it grows ever more personal, bitter and pathetic. On one side, evangelizing New or "Gnu" (ha ha) Atheists like Jerry Coyne and his acolytes at Why Evolution Is True. Dr. Coyne is a biologist who teaches and ostensibly researches at the University of Chicago but has a heck of a lot of free time on his hands for blogging and posting pictures of cute cats.

On the other side, so-called accommodationists like the crowd at the National Center for Science Education, who attack the New Atheists for the political offense of being rude to religious believers and supposedly messing up the alliance between religious and irreligious Darwinists.

I say "supposedly" because there's no evidence any substantial body of opinion is actually being changed on religion or evolution by anything the open haters or the quiet disdainers say. Everyone seems to seriously think they're either going to defeat religion, or merely "creationism," or both by blogging for an audience of fellow Darwinists.

Want to see what I mean? This is all pretty strictly a battle of stinkbugs in a bottle. Try to follow it without getting a headache.

Coyne recently drew excited applause from fellow biologist-atheist-blogger PZ Myers for Coyne's "open letter" (published on his blog) to the NCSE and its British equivalent, the British Centre for Science Education. In the letter, Coyne took umbrage at criticism of the New Atheists, mostly on blogs, emanating from the two accommodationist organizations. He vowed that,

We will continue to answer the misguided attacks [on the New Atheists] by people like Josh Rosenau, Roger Stanyard, and Nick Matzke so long as they keep mounting those attacks.

Like the NCSE, the BCSE seeks to pump up Darwin in the public mind without scaring religious people. This guy called Stanyard at the BCSE complains of losing a night's sleep over the nastiness of the rhetoric on Coyne's blog. Coyne in turn complained that Stanyard complained that a blog commenter complained that Nick Matzke, formerly of the NCSE, is like "vermin." Coyne also hit out at blogger Jason Rosenhouse for an "epic"-length blog post complaining of New Atheist "incivility." In the blog, Rosenhouse, who teaches math at James Madison University, wrote an update about how he had revised an insulting comment about the NCSE's Josh Rosenau that he, Rosenhouse, made in a previous version of the post.

That last bit briefly confused me. In occasionally skimming the writings of Jason Rosenhouse and Josh Rosenau in the past, I realized now I had been assuming they were the same person. They are not!

It goes on and on. In the course of his own blog post, Professor Coyne disavowed name-calling and berated Stanyard (remember him? The British guy) for "glomming onto" the Matzke-vermin insult like "white on rice, or Kwok on a Leica." What's a Kwok? Not a what but a who -- John Kwok, presumably a pseudonym, one of the most tirelessly obsessive commenters on Darwinist blog sites. Besides lashing at intelligent design, he often writes of his interest in photographic gear such as a camera by Leica. I have the impression that Kwok irritates even fellow Darwinists.

There's no need to keep all the names straight in your head. I certainly can't. I'm only taking your time, recounting just a small part of one confused exchange, to illustrate the culture of these Darwinists who write so impassionedly about religion, whether for abolishing it or befriending it. Writes Coyne in reply to Stanyard,

I'd suggest, then, that you lay off telling us what to do until you've read about our goals. The fact is that we'll always be fighting creationism until religion goes away, and when it does the fight will be over, as it is in Scandinavia.

A skeptic might suggest that turning America into Scandinavia, as far as religion goes, is an outsized goal, more like a delusion, for this group as they sit hunched over their computers shooting intemperate comments back and forth at each other all day. Or in poor Stanyard's case, all night.

There's a feverish, terrarium-like and oxygen-starved quality to this world of online Darwinists and atheists. It could only be sustained by the isolation of the Internet. They don't seem to realize that the public accepts Darwinism to the extent it does -- which is not much -- primarily because of what William James would call the sheer, simple "prestige" that the opinion grants. Arguments and evidence have little to do with it.

The prestige of Darwinism is not going to be affected by how the battle between Jerry Coyne and the NCSE turns out. New Atheist arguments are hobbled by the same isolation from what people think and feel. I have not yet read anything by any of these gentlemen or ladies, whether the open haters or the quiet disdainers, that conveys anything like a real comprehension of religious feeling or thought.

Even as they fight over the most effective way to relate to "religion," the open atheists and the accomodationists speak of an abstraction, a cartoon, that no actual religious person would recognize. No one is going to be persuaded if he doesn't already wish to be persuaded for other personal reasons. No faith is under threat from the likes of Jerry Coyne.

If you say they are not saved because they do not know Jesus, then they are punished when they are at no fault. This is a moral problem that the believers in this chosen dogma need to resolve, and reconcile.

...torrents of idiotic, veiled or explicit insults are doled out - completely oblivious to how seriously such behaviour damages their cause - or how happy it makes me to see that I have been vindicated by their vileness.

Wait a second. Not so fast. You can't have it both ways. By referring to a moral problem you are assuming a whole host of things that are self-vitiating. If you are going to presuppose that something in a naturalistic, impersonal, self-caused universe isn't functioning as it 'ought' to function then you owe an account such a notion, because on your terms there isn't any foundation for the existence of morality or moral incumbency in the first place. How can you account in Darwinian terms for assuming that something is not acting as it ought to act? You can't. The concept is an oxymoron, because you can't use it without smuggling in teleology, which is anathema to Darwinistic history.

You inconsistently assume that there is some absolute standard of moral obligation, moral decency and fairness when it is impossible for you on your terms to justify such a standard rationally. Moral disagreements make no sense without presupposing an absolute standard. Please explain exactly how the neuronal electrochemical reactions of your Darwinian brain are prescriptive of "good and evil", "right and wrong", "vile and pure".

Your moral prescriptions and complaints are completely baseless, contradictory and incoherent if such values, as you will sometimes insist, are merely conventional, like driving on the right side of the road instead of the left.

Cordially

I was not asking whether ALL of the tribals, as a collective, are saved or not. If that was what everyone here gathered, they interpreted wrongly. I wanted to know if even a few of them are saved outside of faith in Jesus, how it would be possible - what mechanics would imply in the procedure - those sort of things. There was only a binary answer because those individuals are either saved or they are not. There is no in-between. Remember, I am looking for an exception to the assumed “absolute” rule, to render it invalid. Even one tribal “saved” outside of faith in Jesus would have sufficed.

You've been given that answer before and chosen to ignore it. There is no salvation outside of Jesus. It's through Him always.

If they follow the light that they have received about God and His commandments out of faith, they are still serving Jesus even if they can't put a name to it.

God does not address in Scripture how He plans on specifically dealing with those who have never heard. Therefore your demands for an answer are only going to be someone's conclusion based on Scripture which suggests how He will judge. One passage is Romans 2, which you have been given a few times. There are others. Suffice to say that God will judge justly any who never actually heard the name of Jesus and is not willing that any should perish.

That still doesn't change things for you as you have heard and are accountable for what you do with the knowledge you have, which at this point far surpasses that of the *ignorant tribal*.

Simple - just show me where God speaks out against ‘human’ sacrifice, and then also show me where He is required to follow all of His own mandates

The Bible is full of contradictions which the Christians, naturally, deny. it is true that the Bible offers weak eveidence of God's prohibition of human sacrifice; those who cliam it does offer merely three verses (Genesis 22:10-13, Leviticus 18:21, Deuteronomy 18:10); those who claim it doesn't offer more!

Nevertheless, historical evuidence of Jewish recorded sacrificial practices shows that the ancient Jews did not practice it or condone it, and that this prohibition was based on their interpretation of scriptures, naturally.

The idea that a man can be put to death in place of an animal to "please" God is not supported by any evidence of recorded Jewish history. Therefore the whole Christian idea of Christ being put to death as a sacrificial animal is baseless.

The other side of that coin is the Christian lack of understanding of Jewish sacrificial rites. Animal and grain sacrifices could be offered only for unintentional sins. For intentional sins, the only acceptable atonement was (and is) repentance, not spilled blood.

The Bible is clear that, once the Law has been instituted, no man can atone for another man's sins.

"The person who sins will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son’s iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself. " [Eze 18:20]

This suggestes that Christ could not die because he was a soul that didn't sin. This was the reason the Jews rejected the idea and called it a bluff. In other words, if it was true that Christ was without sin, then his death was faked because he couldn;t die. And if he did die, then he wans't without sin.

Finally, the Passover Lamb was not sacrificed as sin offering. the lamb did not atone for anyone's sins. Therefore Christ could not be a a Paasover Lamb that atones for anyone's (unintentional) sins.

The whole purpose of the Passover lamb was to show that Jews did not worship idols. They killed the Egyptian sacred animal and descertaed it by smearing its blood on their homes, and then ate the slaughtered animal. For their desecration of an idol god's spirit of God spared those homes from killing the firstborn, man and animal.

The animal that takes on the sins of man is not a lam but a (Yom Kippur) goat! No one ever compares Chirst to a Yom Kippur goat! The sinner lays his hands on the animal's head an "transfers" his sins onto the animal who is then either let go or killed, but never offered at the altar.

Clearly, the Christians changed things a little bit (to put it miidly) and made up a whole new religion from it.

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