We are on the way to heaven, yes we are

The pope Bergoglio, otherwise known as Pope Francis says atheists are going to heaven as long as they do good. Don’t you just like the catholic church. First they abolish limbo, then apologise for mistreating Galileo, [am not sure they apologised for burning Giordino Bruno] some priest said hell is just a story am just hoping next they will say the whole thing has always been a fraud. Now my children go home and sin no more but I want your money first! we are all going to heaven, that is if you want to go. Am not going, I prefer to just die.

Sorry protestants, muslims, Judaists, Hindus, Mormons, Buddhists, scientologists, those mad fundamentalists, evangelicals and the rest I haven’t mentioned, you seem not to have passed the bar or the good pope just forgot about you.

Pope Francis Says Atheists Who Do Good Are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics

Blog break 6: A question

Fellow sufferers, am being very generous today. Am not going to argue for existence of gods, Mohammed or Jesus but I have a very simple question.

The apologists have told us that religion is a way of knowing.

Now tell me, is there a time in our lifetime that a scientific answer has been replaced with a religious one?

Just that and please support your answer and preferably if you have a link to the source material include it in your response.

Blog break 5: Bad apologetics

Folks, a christian apologist claims in one of his posts that we atheists are not any different when it comes to cherry picking bible verses. I think I need help here, when is using a bible verse cherry picking? The accuser claims further that we [atheists] never venture out of the OT for fear of finding some teachings of Jesus we may not like for their moral value like when he curses a fig tree out of season or calls others brood of vipers or even worse in the sermon on the mount when he preaches it is blessed to be poor? Well, I got news for you. We don’t cherry pick.

Your accuser is here

In this post he claims talking about evidence with us is a waste of time. Last time we had the discussion on evidence with theists, it came down to see around you that is evidence of god and look at the bible it says it is the word of god and the bible is true because god says so in the bible. Beyond that all other evidence involved is quoting William L. Craig and Platinga, two apologists that it is my opinion their beliefs are far removed from the beliefs held by most other christians.

You know you are reading bad philosophy when you see an argument presented thus

. Matter cannot create itself

. Matter cannot preexist itself

. Matter cannot be eternal nor infinite

the author fails to mention the premise that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. In his argument he has created a strawman and so he is on a roll through and through, there is no beating him. He knows mentioning this important premise puts into question his other premises.

To make his case, he presents the Cosmological argument presenting it as evidence. He writes

. Everything material that begins to exist has come into existence because of an external cause.

. Matter is not eternal

. An infinite regress of cause does not exist

. Matter requires an eternal immaterial Creator

In his first premise, this can’t be said of the universe. He nor me simply do not know and will never know. The premise is also not true because radio-active decay occurs without a discernible cause and the same is true to quantum fluctuations.

I don’t know what evidence he has to support premise two. As far as we can tell if matter can’t be destroyed the only option is it is eternal.

Premise 3 is wrong on two counts. Infinity is a place holder, a term we use to represents large numbers to say it doesn’t exist then you must have performed poorly is mathematics or you attended a creationism school. The second thing that is wrong with this assertion is it can’t be applied to the universe, we can apply to human constructions but when we want to apply it to the universe, we are way out of our depth.

The conclusion in 4 above does not follow from the premises. A case hasn’t been made to warrant a creator and while we are it at it, how does an immaterial creator create what is material? At what point do they interact?

I have seen ridiculous statements, but this will get the trophy as the most ridiculous of the week!

As things stand right now, atheists have no basis for the world-view that they hold.

Atheists are simply believing what they believe on blind faith. And in this case, faith would mean, believing something in the teeth of the evidence to the contrary.

I don’t think this statement requires further comment from me.

For those of you who have time, you can visit his site for entertainment, the link is provided in the body of the post.

On meaning

Folks, many times theists berate atheists because we[ most of us I believe] realize the universe in without purpose. No design and no goal, things in nature are indifferent to our whims or feelings, they just happen. Our lives are inherently absurd and meaningless or as the writer of Ecclesiastes writes in Chapter 3

¹⁸ I also said to myself, “As for humans, God tests them so that they may see that they are like the animals. ¹⁹ Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath; humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless. ²⁰ All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return. ²¹ Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth?”

Faced with this meaninglessness what does man do? You have to choices to choose life through christianity which is a denial of reality. It is a pessimistic view of life based on the mistaken belief that human beings are created by their god to worship him and revere him so that in future they may spend endless time singing hallelujah hosana! or you can choose to live knowing that life ends when the final curtain is drawn, that we have this one life to live to the fullest so that should there be another life elsewhere, the gods shall be proud that we lived a full life here and wouldn’t punish us for that.

One of the greatest teachers to have walked the surface of the earth, Siddhartha Gotama, said of the people who claim to have a passionate relationship with god to be like a young man who has declared he is in love with the most beautiful lady in the village but on being asked how she looks like admits he has never seen her! it is groundless, based on human consciousness alone and nothing more. It is not suggested to us by nature and therefore to claim god gives our lives meaning is to claim unicorns give lives meaning since the existence of the two are just conjecture.

For an apologist to write

The Christian, by contrast, admits right up front that there is more to the universe than physics and chemistry, that minds and meaning do indeed exist, and that we have ultimate purpose in life because there is an ultimate that exists, God. Without God, Dawkins is quite correct that there is no meaning in the question “why do we exist?” But with an infinite God, we have infinite meaning in the universe.

is to pretend to possess some knowledge that isn’t available to the rest of us. It is a mark of arrogance that can only be explained by assuming the author is so brainwashed into believing his religion as true that any other opinion that challenges his world view false short. And what does it mean to talk about an infinite god? Rather what does infinity mean? Isn’t infinity a human concept to describe large numbers the human mind can’t simply conceive and what infinite meaning do we have in the universe?

I contend that our lives are inherently without meaning, but that each of us has to create meaning in their lives. The believer through believing in transcendence hopes that his life has a greater purpose than just spreading his/her genes and the non believer believes that he/she has a duty to live a meaningful life here without attaching any meaning to superstition.

The problem with us

Many commentators in our politics and generally on the third world always try to be politically correct when talking about government excesses. You know you are dealing with nutcases when a beggar earns more than his benefactors and this is the situation we find ourselves in with our MPigs demanding more salaries while the government hops from one capital to the next begging for financial aid which ends up financing the Mpigs side kicks, the leaders companies and so on while those to whom this money was intended never hear of it.

Worse still is to know that each child born today in this country already owes the government staggering amounts of money, sums that were borrowed from our development partners and ended up developing potbellies! The west must demand more from these governments or if they can’t invest directly into the development programmes to keep their money. Their efforts are leaving us poorer and poorer by day.

It is morally and intellectually agonising that a penurious country like Kenya fritters away all its hard-earned and extremely meagre income into the maws of human grubs, maggots, chrysalises and piranhas – an exceedingly voracious species which, however, has never produced even a single commodity or idea.[DN 19/5]

blog break 4: bestiality, morality and an observation

Folks, I don’t know how much of what happens here in the neck of the woods gets beamed on your news screens. Last week we were treated to a news story of bestiality in Mombasa involving teenage girls, some tourists and dogs or so I hear. I don’t at the moment know what is it that transpired in Mombasa though I do hope this will be known in due course.

One of the commentators writes

…..this is a manifestation of moral depravity our society suffers when such acts as bestiality, abortions, homosexuality and casual murders become ingrained in our systems and values.

Why anyone would think homosexuality and abortions are an example of moral depravity is still beyond me.

He goes on to argue for moral divine command. He tells

Mankind too subscribes to a deity whose divine command sets standards of engagement. In our cases, the holy books provide such guidance

I don’t know if the author is aware of the dilemma in the Platonic dialogues where it is asked if something is right because gods command it or gods command it because it is right. To tell us the holy books are a guide it would be nice to know if he would stone his neighbor to death for working on Sabbath.

He then lists chapters in the OT where there are various curses and punishment for different acts. He lists exodus 29:19, Leviticus 18:23, 20:15-16 and Deuteronomy 27:21. My observation has been that injunctions are only issued on things that are going on already and rarely in anticipation of the said acts. In short for the authors these passages to give such warnings, this was already a problem. What we need to ask as students of history is what would drive man to have sex with brutes? Anyone with information on what contributes to such drives would do great justice if they could share their knowledge or direct me to studies on the same.

Questions on free will

I think we are all agreed that we live in a deterministic universe. The choir members, supported by findings in science, hold that the god hypothesis is unnecessary. And we also accept that the world, writ, the universe operates according to physical laws. If we are all part of this nature, why would man’s brain states be subject to different laws?

Why is it so important to have free will?