Think of this promise

That the biographers of Jesus tell us he made. That those who believed in him should not worry about food, clothing or drink that these would be attended to by great providence. Imagine what men and women would do with the time freed from mundane Labour. That they needn’t worry about housing.

It does seem to me, that every where we look, all christ cultists are busy looking for these necessities just like the rest of us. And if there are any who are not doing useful work, they know there are others who are doing the useful work for them.

Or maybe I misunderstood the promise and it is meant for a future life, at which time they wouldn’t need food or shelter.

1×1=1 Therefore god

View at Medium.com

I don’t know about you, but for me, this is the poorest kind of apologetics. I am aware men more intelligent that yours truly have used modal logic to try to demonstrate or proof the being of a god, this fellow right here is taking us for a really long ride. He tells us, with confidence, that until now, faith has not had evidence thorough enough to convince anyone that a deity has brought this universe into being. First, though, god can be anything- a computer program, a force, could be sentient being or maybe not- who knows.

How are we to get from 11111111² to the existence of a god, you ask? It’s through a specie of the argument from design. We are made to imagine a spire appearing somewhere in Mars. That several probes sent to observe this spire all arrive to the same conclusion that this spire must have been designed. This far, the same arguments that are fatal to the design argument apply here. But let’s hold here it for a moment.

Our interlocutor wants us to believe 1*1=1 because it was designed by some higher intelligence. I have used 1*1=1 instead of 11111111² to make the point that this argument is really weak. Am sure, Neil will agree, that as far as math is concerned, 1*1=1 regardless of the planet we are in. That 11111111² gives us 12345678987654321 is not different from the fact that we get 1 when 1*1. And if you find this beautiful, who am i to stop you, besides, beauty, they say depends on the beerholder.

Maybe I am missing something.

In other interesting news, this Nigerian has decided to tackle superstition in his home country head on. I do hope he manages to stay out of jail for much longer. He, really, is the mad man in the market who has killed god.

Stumping atheists

If god didn’t create atheists, who did?

Maybe you are a catholic or a christian and are confused about evolution. You don’t know whether to reject it outright or to reject genesis. The Roman church has a solution for you. Following Augustine and other church fathers, church tradition recognizes that Genesis uses figurative language and as such cannot be a scientific text that rules out human evolution altogether.

If you had worn your dancing shoes after reading the above paragraph, just remove them. The same church specifically rejects the conclusions of Darwin which insist that evolution was the result of random forces. To the church, evolution is only acceptable if it is guided by an intelligent designer, god. The church having warned scientists to avoid pretentious claims that are beyond the realm of inquiry goes ahead and tells us god could have created human bodies through evolution but immediately created their souls at the moment of conception. How do they know this?

To justify its continued existence, the church then tells us the fall as recorded in Genesis was a real event in time ( curious people want to know the date and place). And following this fall, everyone contracts a sin, original sin, at birth. This hereditary blemish can be cleansed if you get the right baptism, the catholic one. However, this baptism leaves you with some spiritual and moral weaknesses that can only be overcome through god’s grace.

Just in case you are wondering whether Jesus inherited this blemish, he wasn’t because through some god magic, Mary was also born without it.

Any one in business who wants to reap where they didn’t saw for 100 of years if not thousands should follow the model of the church. Tell the people they have a defect. Be the only supplier of the remedy. Embed yourself in their lives, from the cradle to the grave. And make sure they are told about your product before they reach the age of reason and you will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Have a sinful weekend everyone, especially those who were not baptised. Your original sin is still intact.

why i am an atheist

No, not me, but Bhagat Singh

It is a long-ish article but worth the time and effort.

Society must fight against this belief in God as it fought against idol worship and other narrow conceptions of religion. In this way man will try to stand on his feet. Being realistic, he will have to throw his faith aside and face all adversaries with courage and valour. That is exactly my state of mind. My friends, it is not my vanity; it is my mode of thinking that has made me an atheist. I don’t think that by strengthening my belief in God and by offering prayers to Him every day, (this I consider to be the most degraded act on the part of man) I can bring improvement in my situation, nor can I further deteriorate it. I have read of many atheists facing all troubles boldly, so I am trying to stand like a man with the head high and erect to the last; even on the gallows.

Let us see how steadfast I am. One of my friends asked me to pray. When informed of my atheism, he said, “When your last days come, you will begin to believe.” I said, “No, dear sir, Never shall it happen. I consider it to be an act of degradation and demoralisation. For such petty selfish motives, I shall never pray.” Reader and friends, is it vanity? If it is, I stand for it.

There are bad arguments

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other: “Do you believe in life after delivery?”The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.” “Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?” The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.” The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.” The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.” The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.” “Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.” The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?” The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.” Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.” To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.” May be this was one of the best explanations to the concept of GOD.

LinkedIn post

And then there is this one. What’s shocked me is how everyone who has made a comment on the above post believes it is the best specie of argument they have come across. This is making a virtue out of ignorance and faith. It is not right to ask people to believe things without evidence.

The brain is not a truth generating machine, rather a pattern recognition machine. Therefore, listening to our imagination doesn’t bring us closer to truth. Pure reason, as Kant told us many years ago, doesn’t bring us closer to determining whether there is a god.

Unless I am missing something.

Why can’t we see god?

This author argues it is because she wants us to choose to love her and to protect our freewill. This argument doesn’t hold unless the proponent can show that in the many narratives involving god showing up for bbq, that the people she interacted with had no freewill. If Adam and Eve had god immediately in their presence and still had room to eat the fruit, which among other things, god needed not have told them about its existence, then the argument about fear is moot. It doesn’t hold any water.

Christians, some of them, insist Jesus is God. If this is true, then what do we say about the disciples? Was it their fear of hell that kept them with Jesus? Didn’t god know this? The same Christians, who believe in trinity, tells us the spirit is god and it is with us. How is this then squared with the claim god doesn’t show herself because if that happened we wouldn’t love her?

I say we can’t see god the same way we can’t see Santa. God(s) so far as I can tell have no existence out of the human mind. This, to me, is the most likely answer. What gods are is unknown to us. What they look like is unknown to us. Besides, we have apologists tell us god is spirit, is without form and all that makes it way impossible for us to see such a being given we lack the necessary apparatus to see spirits.

It is absurd to suggest that a being desirous of having a relationship with you would seek to do this by hiding. What relationship is that even? A delusion?

For those interested in further reading, In defense of William Rowe’s Evidential argument from evil by Nick Trakakis, makes for good reading on the different arguments that apologists have advanced to defend divine hiddenness.

Heaven or hell

Yudhistara is taken to paradise first by Vyasa where he finds his friends and family missing. He demands to see them. They descend to a place with putrid smell and all. Then Bhima, Karna, Draupadi, Arjuna all tell him they are down there. His next words should be hang in all churches and mosques: I will stay here with my family.

Vyasa then tells him that was the final illusion; there is no paradise no hell. No words. No friends. No enemies. Just silence.

As long as one man is in hell, heaven should not be occupied. That is, if there is a heaven.

Don’t worry, be happy. Once you die, it is all silence. But don’t take my word for it. Die and find out.

theists 1 atheists 0

while atheists are stuck in their position that the theists have not provided evidence for their claims about god, and others go as far as claiming theists have not even passed the first hurdle; what is god and why is it necessary that a god exists, the theists have 10 proofs. Who can deny 10 proofs? Only fools eh. What are these 10 proofs?

The first 5 proofs are the 5 ways of Thomas Aquinas. The first proof makes a claim that we have no way of confirming, that is, for something to happen in nature, there’s got to be something at the beginning of it that is outside of nature. We can’t know this. In the second proof, Aquinas is simply saying, I don’t know, therefore God. 3 way introduces a necessary existence which he makes his god. The 4th way is to say there are degrees of ugliness and the perfect ugliness must be god. The 5th way is the best. A rock falls down and not up because god. If this proof doesn’t convince you, I don’t know what will.

The 6th proof is quite complex. I can point at a tree and i can describe a tree. What connects the tree and my description is god.

The seventh proof is not a proof really, but is in itself need of proof. It is a claim that there has to be a powerful something causing organization in the world.

Mathematics or our concept of justice have actual existence out of our minds and therefore this is the 8th proof of god.

Things don’t just exist. The reason for their existence is god. And this is our 9th proof.

To deny the existence of god is to deny the existence of moral law. This is the 10th proof.

Atheists I know you are now totally stumped and will be walking in droves to join the church next door or you will go to hell.

Have a proof full day, won’t you.

Belief has no place where truth is concerned

God does not exist

Does god exist?

These two videos speak to the same topic. I hadn’t heard of Prof Peter Millican before this, but I like him. He is eloquent. As for Krishnamurti, I have read some of his works and I agree with some if not most of it. The two videos will take a max of 35 minutes but you will thank me for days for contributing to your education.

Enjoy

the problem of evil

is not a problem for atheists unless one doesn’t understand what the problem is.

So first, as a public service announcement, I will share the problem in brief. More complex formulations of the argument have been made and anyone interested can look at the works of Hume, Platinga, Swinburne, and Rowe among others. But for now, we will refer to Epicurus formulation of the problem, thus

is god willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is not omnipotent

is he able but not willing? then he is malevolent

is he both willing and able? then whence cometh evil?

is he neither unwilling and not able? then why call him god?

It can be seen immediately that this is a problem for a certain species of gods. These are those gods whose followers claim are omnipotent and omniscient. If one believes in a god without omni properties, then the problem of evil is lessened or even eliminated. It is therefore absurd to claim that the atheist has a problem of evil.

The author of this post, starts by making absurd premises, arguing

so that if creatures are not able to err and so do evil, they cannot act, and so are not actual

and i am going to sit here and wait for an example of evil committed by a sloth. And even before that first paragraph is complete, we are told

Thus if God was going to create anything whatsoever, he had no option in logic but to open the way to error, evil, sin, and death.

which immediately presents a contradiction. There is no logical contradiction involved in the sentence; to create a being that doesn’t err. In fact, the theist undermines their case because they without blinking an eye posit the existence of angels that cannot err and a heaven peopled with beings that can’t err. So which is it?

The apologist’s next step is a strawman. We are told

If there is no God, then there is no such thing as evil

which wasn’t the contention. The question is how can we reconcile the evil that we see with the existence of an all loving and powerful god? If we agree there is no god, as there is no evidence for any, then we are left with evil and a question of how to respond to it. And even from the examples the theist gives thinking he stumped the atheist, it is men and women who have acted to end, or reduce the evil being perpetrated. It is through the action of men that the slave trade ended- at least in theory-; it is through the actions of men that the second world war ended. I am willing to be shown evidence that a god intervened in either of the two examples I have given.

And what I said at the beginning of this post is clearly evident. Here, we have a theist with access to the internet but is afraid to do any thinking. He writes

There can be only “problems.” On atheism, there is no Problem of Evil, because there is no evil. Thus there is nothing whatever to which an atheist might object, on grounds transcendent to or therefore more suasive than those of his own private and nowise privileged preferences.

Which is a strawman. On atheism, there is no problem of evil not because there is no evil, but because an all loving and powerful god doesn’t exist– at least no evidence exists for such a god. So we are left with evil bit no god. And what we do from here is what matters. Do we sit by and watch as pastors feed their flock bleach as treatment for covid or do we as reasonable people stop such atrocities?

Or am i missing something?