Posted on 05/01/2011 7:24:18 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
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.
But morality didn't change.
What was wrong in the OT is still wrong in the NT.
Actually, the main point in atheists using this argument is to justify their rejection of God.
If they can charge Him with evil or immorality, they can condemn Him for it. That allows them to feel morally superior to God and gives them excuse for passing judgment on Him and rejecting Him.
They are judge, jury, and hangman of God based on their own arbitrarily established system of morality which weighs God and finds Him wanting.
Explain why death is bad. Why is the death of that child wrong?
On what basis do you determine that the child's death was wrong?
I understand tha argument, however how do you marry that unchanging condition to God's decision to say "Let there be light."?
What's wrong with not making goat meat casseroles that bothers you so much?
But the morality did change. What was morally right in the OT is not necessarily morally right today.
Atheists have no standing to criticize anyone for any thing.
By their worldview, we're all just dust in the wind. Meaningless, purposeless, accidents of chaos in a random universe.
It's hypocritical to condemn one set of beliefs as invalid and arbitrarily set up another of your own preference as valid. There is no legitimate reason for yours to be superior to any others and no reason to use it to condemn others.
The very fact that you do that indicates that you are appealing to an objective standard of right and wrong. And what is the source of that standard, if not God?
Ahh, a "If a frog had a glass ass" conjecture. Likewise, if 2=4 then Jones is a filbert.
Real objective standards that are the nature of God Himself?
Let's take a look at a few of those "Standards". Exodus 34:7 Keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.
That is a nice way to start out the Ten commandments don't you think? Punishing children for the sins of their fathers? That is moral?
34:11 Observe thou that which I command thee this day: behold, I drive out before thee the Amorite, and the Canaanite, and the Hittite, and the Perizzite, and the Hivite, and the Jebusite.
Conquering a few countries for no reason at all. Didn't you mention something about Might makes Right? That God's attributes you say.
34:16 And thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters go a whoring after their gods, and make thy sons go a whoring after their gods.
That sounds like a fun attribute of God, to take their daughters unto thy sons? Remember these are the morals of your GOD.
34:17 Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
How is that morality again? It sounds like jealousy to me. Is jealousy Moral?
34:26 The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the LORD thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.
I am confused about that commandment. How important really is seething a kid in his mother's milk?
Those are the MORALS of your GOD? The very nature of your GOD itself? Do you even take them seriously?
Interesting how the first lie told to humanity keeps coming back again and again and again...
Surely there is no new thing under the sun.
How is describing my lack of religious belief "retreating"?
For that matter, what is it about agnosticism that would cause you to describe it as a "place to cower"?
My opinion on the Scriptural reason for the child’s death is that the child was a ‘type’ of the anti-christ. The picture here is that God could not allow him to become king over God’s people because that is not a true type of the Messiah.
Wives who commit adultery are a ‘type’ of humanity/Israel rejecting God as their husband in favor of a satanic relationship. Men who sleep with other men’ wives take the position of satan coming between the bride and her husband (God). Either way, the offspring of such relationships can never be a type of the Messiah.
God could not allow the child of an adulterous relationship to become king because that is a false ‘type’ of the coming Messiah. The child represented the seed of satan, the antichrist, which is born of satanic adultery by the wife (Israel), dies and does not become king of God’s people. Note that the child dies on the 7th day, representing the beast being cast into the lake of fire at the end of the 7-year tribulation period.
It is the second son of David and Batsheba (the second Adam, Messiah) who becomes King over God’s people forever.
Ah, morality by consensus and communism. How typically atheist of you.
That is presuming that you have reasoned responses to begin with.
Responses, you have.
Reasoned? Not so much.
You are holding others to standards of proof that you refuse to hold yourself to. By definition, you are a hypocrite.
Such as?
Very interesting.
I never looked at it that way before.
Another issue is that the prohibition to taking someone’s life is to not murder.
Soldiers are not charged with murder when killing enemy combatants in the line of duty. The executioner is not charged with murder when administering the death penalty at the direction of civil authorities. People are not charged with murder in the event of an accidental death or the killing of someone in self-defense.
And the prohibition against murder is for mankind.
God is the author of life. He determines the number of our days. When He, in His wisdom knowing the beginning from the end, decides that our time has come, He is not killing people. As creator He owns the right to decide when the physical, earthly life is over, but since the eternal, spiritual life is well, eternal, He didn’t really kill anyone.
In addition, it is only mankind which determines that we are all owed a long, happy, healthy, prosperous life and if someone doesn’t fully live out the length of those days in such a way, they have somehow been cheated or robbed or wronged by God somehow.
Thus we see the vapid arguments that God is bad for killing an *innocent* little baby. Based on what? That somehow that child is owed a long, happy, healthy, prosperous life?
Says who?
Stoning disobedient children to death, slavery, polygamy, rape, atrocities, etc.
Oh, please, Japan has morality by consensus and it's not "communist".
If all this is true, then why did this deity allow the conception of the child in the first place? Surely it was not the Devil's spawn...
Information about what happened before the Big Bang we know about is nil. The Big Bang is not the absolute beginning of all beginnings, just of the Universe we know about.
To that end, if other universes existed before the Big Bang, is a matter of science that is yet unresolved.
My time argument is very valid with respect to a sentient being ordering sequential events. If there is no time, then there is no separation between stages. Without separation, an uncreated Universe and a created one exist at the same moment. That is the absurdity. This absurdity has to be resolved by the deity you speak of. The only solution is to allow time to bring about the separation. Without time, the problem arises. With time, God is no more God.
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