Reader Barry spotted this on Twi**er via reddit. This “Atheist Test” proves only how mushbrained the creator was:
It always amazes me that some people answer “c”: scientists have an ulterior motivation for denying the obvious fact that life didn’t evolve, but was created by God. What ulterior motive could we have for that? The usual one suggested is that it helps buttress atheism, but at least half of American scientists are at least somewhat religious, and many who accept evolution, like Ken Miller and Francis Collins, are devoutly religious. I suppose the artist, in his superior wisdom, thinks that people like that are fools.
Oh, and given the way science works, if design by God really were true, great encomiums would befall the scientist who demonstrated that.
How does God explain “New Coke”?
Ah, the eternal struggle with theodicy.
Or that abomination, Cherry Coke? Or even worse, Coke Zero which is devoid of caffeine? Is it all Satan?
Thought Satan was the explanation for Crystal Pepsi.
Actually I think that is probably Diet Pepsi that Satan unleashed upon humankind.
I love me some Cherry Coke
I drink Zero all the time and I’m pretty sure it has Caffeine.
I stand corrected. It’s Pepsi Satan unleashed on humankind anyway. 😛
You could go to Pei Wei where there are 105 flavors to mix into regular Coke. With mixtures of all flavors there are more than 10^107 combinations for making a new flavor of Coke…possibly even flavors God could not have foreseen. 😀
Yuck! Just leave Coke alone. 🙂
Back when I was fourteen, I was introduced to “Coffee-Coke”- iced coffee mixed half-and-half with Coca-Cola. I LOVED it!
Nowadays, after 50 years, I drink “Coffee-Pepsi”: Diet Pepsi and instant coffee- I found that the Pepsi doesn’t foam nearly as much as the Coke. It has a unique flavor and will definitely “get you movin'”. I didn’t drink it for 50 years, just started again a few years ago.
That would probably give me a heart attack but I can see such a beverage becoming popular.
Because you *hate* god. And want to be able to live your hedonistic lifestyle without consequences. Duh.
/s
I continue to be amazed by how many Christians actually think that atheists believe in god but are angry with god, hate god or, somehow, “deny” the god they know exists so they can live their life of crime. I find this in discussions with acquaintances, in crappy movies, and even in characters by authors I actually like.
I’m assuming this is a case of Christians projecting their own mindset on atheists, where they literally can’t imagine not believing in God, so they assume that everyone else believes in god, no matter what they say.
“I continue to be amazed by how many Christians actually think that atheists believe in god but are angry with god, hate god or, somehow, deny the god they know exists so they can live their life of crime”
I am one as you describe. Mere non-theists are not here. Most (IMO) atheists that are actively commenting on the issue do indeed believe in God in the way that you believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, dragons or unicorns. They are points of reference; the point itself doesn’t need to have physical existence (although it might).
Anti-theists have very specific ideas about god and are indeed frequently angry. Some (my brother or my father for instance) wish to behave in ways that their belief in god prohibits. This creates conflict, conflict begets commentary on websites.
People that really have no belief, or even opinion, about “god” and don’t even know what the word means are not here and they go about their lives inconspicuously.
I have mentioned in the past, and will mention again because it is relevant to your comment, that my atheist father nevertheless quietly recited the Lords Prayer at the funeral of his mother’s second husband. I alone heard him do so. I cannot even do that. Was he merely hedging his bets? Does he really, deep down inside, believe however provisionally that there is or might be a god of the Lutheran flavor? I am not a mind reader but I can observe behavior.
A logical inconsistency exists when you say there is no god but it turns out you have a specific god in mind. You must instantiate a definition in order to deny it.
I’m a little confused. When you say you are one as Scote describes, are you the Christian, the one who is angry with god, or the one who wants to live the life of crime?
In any case, I think most anti-theists are actually anti-religionists for the most part. If there were not odious followers of various religions causing trouble they would not be here commenting. The theism most people here resist is the theism of actual people that we encounter… in our families, in government, flying planes into buildings, and so on. If theism were invisible and effect-free, non-theisim would be also.
Yup. I can’t think of anyone who considers themselves an “anti-deist.”
An anti-deist (mostly scientists) is someone who thinks that any God-hypothesis is not only worthless but harmful. These types of people exist.
I am one such anti-deist scientist.
Gods are simply dead hypotheses. Trying to resurrect all or part of dead hypotheses without commensurate evidence means breaking the rules of accurate reasoning (like introducing 0 = 1 as an axiom), and from that point you can deduce whatever you like.
Theism was a somewhat plausible hypothesis at the time it was postulated (ontologically mental phenomena are very natural postulates for minds with no knowledge of the concept of mechanism). Deism is a remnant of it. The proper way to handle an hypothesis whose basis has disappeared, and whose explanatory power is nil, is to remove it outright, not to cut off a few bit.
If I deduced it rained because I saw wet grass, then later find no evidence of rain elsewhere (and nobody, starting with professional rain-watchers, has seen rain that night), then later find out that there were sprinklers on, the reasonable conclusion is that there was no rain. Not that there was metaphorical rain, or an Essence of rain manifesting itself through sprinklers.
Your conclusions must not depend on the order in which you form hypotheses or encounter evidence.
I am one of those. (Though I’m a computer programmer by profession and a philosopher by training, not a scientist.)
Ah, the usual religious canard that atheists deny the existence of god(s).
They refuse to accept the existence of whatever god you may have in mind (typically this god exhibits multiple inconsistent and incoherent attributes such as omnipotence and omniscience) based on a complete lack of evidence and would be willing to revise their position should, in the highly unlikely event, such evidence be provided.
So yes, I deny whatever god you have in mind.
So the only logical inconsistency exists in the mind of the believer, the onus is not on the atheist to have any specific god in mind given that so many mutually exclusive definitions of this mythological being exist, quite often within the mind of the same believer at different times and places.
As for anger, speaking for myself, it is the injection of the odious beliefs of god botherers into the public market place of ideas and concomitant waste of time and resources spent refuting these bad ideas which have so many negative consequences in the real world for real beings.
And then there is the anger engendered by believers promulgating the same baseless lies about atheists over and over utterly impervious to refutations of this type of propaganda.
When your father recited the Lord’s Prayer he was probably engaging in a familiar, comforting ritual which felt “right” in an emotional situation. I don’t think you need to read too much into it.
We pick up many habits from our childhood or our culture which we’ve come to reject. This doesn’t mean we still believe in them “deep down.” On the contrary, it’s superficial behavior, or verbal tics (like when atheists say “Damn” or “God help us.”) There’s no intellectual conflict underneath.
I think the belief that there must a serious battle going on is related to the idea that our intuitive, impulsive, or instinctive self is our REAL self. Not necessarily. It’s more complicated than that. Childhood indoctrination pops up from time to time, as do old superstitions and irrational or selfish passions — but our rational rejection and regular restraint of them is much more indicative of who we really are, and what we’ve chosen to become.
I had the same thought. Years of having those words drummed in between age 5 and 18 make for easy recitation even now, although they carry no meaning. My children (in their 20s) probably don’t even know the sequence of words – so such a response would clearly be less likely to come from one of them.
Yes. I still say “Bless you” sometimes when people sneeze, or “Thank god”. They are just phrases to me, and they no more imply belief in a deity to me than noting today is Thursday means I believe in the existence of the god Thor.
Gesundheit! ⚡️⚡️⚡️
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Yes, that’s the one I use, but tend to get funny looks.
On the other hand, I can’t stop myself looking for a piece of wood to touch (or knock on, for USAians) when I predict that something will turn out OK. There’s no part of me that believes it will make the slightest difference, but I still do it.
Me too!
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I take exception to your characterization of a nonbeliever’s tossing off “damn” (or stronger religious invective) as a mere “verbal tic”; it is an art form — at least when delivered with aplomb, panache, or verve. 🙂
I’ve seen some world-class cursers, swearers, and blasphemers in my time. Could pull off the deed in multiple languages, some of ’em.
Indeed.
I once read an interview with a social researcher whose international field of study was “cursing.” IIrc he explained that swearing was categorized into scatalogical, blasphemy, sex, and family. When asked which country was the world class winner in cussing, he replied “Hungary.” Apparently the Hungarians are very creative in their combinations of the above.
I would not know.
It seems to be a thing, sort of. I collect dictionaries (sort of) and my parents found me a “dictionary of euphemisms” which does document the creep from euphemism to vulgarity to slang and in other directions and so on. A lot of the entries are in the categories mentioned.
Me too! My Dad was a sea captain; when he had some of his cronies over and the drinks were served and the tales began, their expletives were technicolor.
I, OTOH, am always annoyed by how banal my cursing usually is. When I was in college, it was basically just a matter of inserting as many f-words as possible. (As delightfully parodied in Hair.)
Agreed. In no way should my habit of saying “Jesus [fucking] Christ!” at moments of frustration be taken to indicate any belief in the actuality of Jeezus. (If I had a Muslim background it would be Mohammed instead, of course).
cr
One of my favorite Jesus related exclamations is: “xxx scared the big Jesus out of me.” 🙂
You might be thinking of “bejesus”, an expletive I used to hear all the time from my Irish relations.
Sounds like an eggcorn to me.
Egg-zactly!
When I went to public elementary school in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada we had to recite the Lord’s Prayer and stand for Oh Canada.
Sometime between grade 3 and 7 (between 1970 and 1974) the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer stopped. I don’t know if this was local to my school(s), school district or province. It was not officially challenged in supreme court until 1989, at which point it was ruled unconstitutional.
I never heard it again school. I think I could mumble my way through it, if there are other people who actually know it reciting it out loud. I think I could belt out Oh Canada but I very much doubt anyone would want me to.
I have come to understand it depended on your school. I went to elementary school in Ontario from 1975-1984 and said the Lord’s Prayer all through it.
In my elementary school (nominally Protestant) in Quebec, in grade 1 we did LP every day. In grade 4, “sometimes”, though I never did figure out the pattern. I was in grade 1 for the 1983-1984 school year, for what that’s worth.
You’re naïvely (or disingenuously) conflating belief in the existence of the thing and of the concept.
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Holy crap.
So, according to you, in order for someone to really, legitimately, sincerely *not* believe [X], they must completely ignore others who do believe [X]?
Let’s say your daughter developed a psychosis in which she thought she could fly, and you frequently had to restrain her from jumping off tall structures. If you make attempts to show her that she’s mistaken about being able to fly, then you actually also believe she can fly, deep down?
A corollary to that is uncertainty breeds conflict. My brother hasn’t had a religious thought in his life and yet he is conflicted about a great many things particularly with regard to nudity or sex; lingering taboos that ordinarily are linked to religion but he doesn’t have one. Because of that he also has no “handles” on these fears and conflicts by which they could be resolved.
I have a nearly perfect knowledge of the existence of god, and thus easily separate meaningless human noise and I enjoy nudity and sex without guilt. What is important is “love your neighbor”; also, broken heart and a contrite spirit. I’ll work on that one a bit later.
On re-reading I sense that it is a bit ambiguous. I think the point I am making is that shame and guilt is somewhat natural and self-imposed, but also imposed by conflict with social norms.
Religion provides an escape, a way to repent or atone, to have guilt removed. It isn’t the only way but it is a good way.
When I was in the Navy and promoted to LPO (leading petty officer) I immediately took action against a junior, black, female petty officer that had a long history of being late or just not coming to her appointed place of duty at all. Prior to me no one would do anything about it because of being two protected classes of person simultaneously.
The result was an amazing transformation. Her punishment was negligible, she was required to come an hour early each day for a month and she couldn’t even manage that but she was at least on-time for the first time in her career. More importantly, my action meant that I cared and honored my role as LPO and that meant I was someone she could honor and trust to do my duty, so she became willing to do her duty.
After that she was pleasant to work with and for the most part did her duty; but pretty much only with or for me.
People need penance; they need to work out their transformation. It is not enough for someone to say, “Well, no big deal”, or “That’s okay, I forgive you”. You cheat people out of their opportunity to make it right.
Atheists can still make physical things right, if they trespass on their neighbor for instance; but if they feel spiritually guilty but deny the power or existence of god, how can that guilt be removed? It cannot.
Hey Michael,
I suspect that your story is complete fiction, but for the sake of argument let’s assume it’s true.
So you used your authority to impose punishment on this poor woman and the result was that she would only change her behaviour around you.
In what sense is this a transformation ?
It sounds like you are a sociopathic bully abusing a position of power and this woman had no recourse but to accede to your harassment.
This is typical behavior for the religious, given that their moral system is not based on rationality and evidence, it can only be imposed by force.
steve oberski wrote “I suspect that your story is complete fiction”
Denier!
“but for the sake of argument let’s assume it’s true.”
An argument can proceed without this assumption.
“So you used your authority to impose punishment on this poor woman and the result was that she would only change her behavior around you.”
Yes. It really is quite amazing how that works and relates to my earlier comment on the power of religion to remove guilt.
It isn’t religion per se that removes guilt, rather, the creator of morals is the creator of guilt and also the remover of guilt.
The Navy is, in some ways, like a religion; it has a moral code (the UCMJ) and from that code comes guilt for violating that code.
Punishment, however trivial, is essential to remove guilt and its shame.
As to honoring me, that results from care and mutual respect, a thing you seem to lack. I cared to give her an opportunity to do penance and remove guilt.
“In what sense is this a transformation?”
Where she had been angry, insolent and depressed for many months; she became cheerful and cooperative.
“It sounds like you are a sociopathic bully abusing a position of power and this woman had no recourse but to accede to your harassment.”
You are incredibly weak and protected. How is being made to come to work on time each day for a month “sociopathic”?
But yes, her choices were limited:
(1) accept military duty or
(2) leave the military with less than Honorable discharge.
I will explain the relationship of guilt and military dysfunction:
When one sailor gets off “scot free” from an offense, but other sailors have not, it creates a potentially serious discipline problem. The special sailor cannot “hang out” with other sailors, for if she does, she will be harassed, mocked and tormented for having a special status. The Forrestal riots come to mind.
It is this special status that ostracizes a human person from any group, the Navy is just more acute because of high density housing, barracks or a ship.
She had to be punished, at least trivially, to heal the wound in her soul and bridge the barrier between her and her peers, and of course the barrier between her and her own juniors and superiors. The hierarchy is broken if the chain of command has a guilty person in it with corresponding breakdown in mutual respect going up and down.
You call me a sociopath. What would you have done? You called her a poor woman. You are pathetic and sexist. She was a sailor in the United States Navy and you have no standing to be insulting sailors.
“This is typical behavior for the religious, given that their moral system is not based on rationality and evidence, it can only be imposed by force.”
Thank you! Showing compassion for others is indeed a hallmark of “the religious” and appears to be irrational; not something measured with a voltmeter or produced by Boolean Logic.
I am bound to honor and duty and thus was attracted to a religion that appreciates and develops honor and duty and a career that requires honor and duty. Now sometimes I work with Boy Scouts to teach these principles to young men. Honor is what you have, duty is what you do, even when (and especially when) no one is there to applaud or witness.
Honor distills from doing right things for right reasons and it helps to have a code of what is “right”.
What a hideous, authoritarian, petty-disciplinarian view of life. I think I’ve heard virtually the same argument from white-supremacist South Africans / Rhodesians etc – “the blacks need someone to tell them what to do. They just get confused if you give them too many choices”. I’ve read the same argument quoted by Victorian-era missionaries, along the lines of ‘the Devil makes work for idle hands’. Substitute whatever underclass you like, the argument is essentially the same.
“She had to be punished to heal the wound in her soul”. What arrant bullshit. Possibly she had to be punished to maintain military discipline; I doubt its effectiveness in ‘healing souls’.
And standing on your dignity and taking manufactured offense doesn’t work in this forum – nobody needs ‘standing’ to be insulting sailors (not that Steve was). Doesn’t work for the whiny students at Emory, doesn’t work here.
cr
Good to see I was not the only one a little creeped out by that.
I mean, not the fact that she had to show up early (that was fine) but the way he described punishment as necessary to “heal the wound in her soul”.
I bet inquisitors talked about healing souls every time they meted out their punishments.
The wording of it just freaks me out.
I have some red flags I look for when I date guys. Some girls in my family have ended up with crazy guys so I was reminded that it is good to take precautions (this is not just one sided mind you. There are some crazy women out there also after all).
Talking about punishment and honor like that would cause me to look for the nearest exit.
Sorry to say it.
Agh. I hate the lack of an edit button. Meant to say at the end that the expression doesn’t mean that Michael is crazy or anything (didn’t mean for the post to sound like an ad hominem). Just that some expressions makes alarms go off in my head. And those alarms probably developed through by evolution through my life. 🙂
Bravo, infinite & Linn! Thanks for calling out this poster’s creepy, “a hideous, authoritarian, petty-disciplinarian view of life.”
(Not to mention that he’s the personification of an internet troll.
–Wikipedia)
What do you mean by spiritual guilt? As opposed to, say, physical guilt? I genuinely have no idea what spiritual guilt is. Anyway, this is how I would solve feeling guilty:
If I rob someone or tread on someone’s toes, I ask forgiveness from them. It’s really that easy. Importantly, he is also the only one who could grant forgiveness. God, unrobbed and untrodden upon, simply doesn’t have the authority to forgive. He is not the injured party.
And if the other guy forgives me, that is enough. I haven’t been “cheated out” of my opportunity to make it right. I have actually made it right to a satisfactory degree.
The real cheaters are the ones who think they can bypass the people who are actually injured by asking God to do the forgiving. Third party forgiveness is a wicked and immoral doctrine.
Well, we are talking about Christianity, after all.
I think third party forgiveness is also a doctrine in Judaism and Islam.
It’s a great power structure. First the priest makes people feel guilty by setting impossible standards (so they’re bound to fail) or he tells the people they should feel guilty because of who they are (original sin). Then he provides the solution: “Pray to God! (my God, specifically.)” However, because God doesn’t directly grant forgiveness or speak to people, the forgiving is done on His behalf by priests claiming to speak in His name. How very convenient. An enormous amount of power is allocated to these priests!
And if you reject this wonderful offer and continue to sin, you’ll burn in hell for all eternity. Beg or burn.
Ofcourse there is no God and the theological concept of sin is nonsense. But even if God does exist, religion would still be a racket and forgiveness would still be immoral and wicked.
*addendum: third party forgiveness would be immoral and wicked.
I think it is also a key feature in many types of classic carny* scams too. I’m sure swindler’s had this angle figured out long before writing was invented.
(*Not NZ “carny” Heather!)
“Third party forgiveness is a wicked and immoral doctrine.”
It doesn’t exist in my religion. As you have stated, the person to forgive you is the party you have injured.
However if your trespass against your neighbor is also a violation of a moral commandment of God, then you have created a separation, a burden, and must resolve that one, too.
Sometimes lying does not actually injure anyone but you still have a burden of moral guilt. It might actually be unwise to tell the truth to the person to whom you lied (you might be a spy for the USA for instance) but the fact is you lied. This can be a difficult situation for some (hopefully most) people.
You aren’t a Christian then? In the interests of clarity please give some clear description of your religious belief.
darrelle “You aren’t a Christian then? In the interests of clarity please give some clear description of your religious belief.”
It is pretty clear to me that a benevolent, omni-everything God does not exist because such a thing cannot exist; and yet something exists I call “God”. Many other things exist as well.
I do not believe in ex-nihilo creation. Something does not come out of nothing. I accept that the universe was packed really tight at the beginning of the story of this universe. The story has a beginning, the Universe does not. The singularity of the big bang must have a predecessor; or so I choose to believe.
Every form of life on Earth has one thing in common — they make more of themselves. So what is God doing? The same. Making more of himself. The long, slow hard way since apparently that’s either the best way or the only way.
At some point of evolution sapience and language arises. I believe that is where God had some sort of involvement. Until then it appears that the Earth brought forth life and God’s involvement was to pronounce it “good”.
I believe most Christian churches exist to bring people to a knowledge of God. However, they don’t have much to go on and are compelled to decide such things in committee, or leave important things undecided, or obfuscate it with many words and rituals. Mormons are an exception having a simpler understanding of a slightly-less-omni God that does not require straining at gnats.
I was raised without religion and chose based on my own personal experiences then, and nothing since then has caused me to believe I made a mistake. I continue to study and learn.
I do not accept the existence of paradox; a benevolent God cannot and would not create his own enemy that is also the enemy of his creation. However, a wise God might well allow this enemy to exist once it came into existence or has always existed. It serves as a counterbalance and is vital to free will and choice.
Well that’s about as much as I think can be posted without overly straining the theme of this website.
I do not believe in ex-nihilo creation. Something does not come out of nothing. I accept that the universe was packed really tight at the beginning of the story of this universe. The story has a beginning, the Universe does not. The singularity of the big bang must have a predecessor; or so I choose to believe.
So many mistakes in fifty-seven words! The net energy of our universe is almost certainly zero, so “something does not come out of nothing” is meaningless. The universe was not “packed really tight [where have all the adverbs gone?]”, it did not exist as such. A singularity is a prediction of general relativity, and physicists have long known that this is incompatible with quantum mechanics; with the discovery of “dark energy”, possible solutions of this problem have begun to emerge, and the singularity version of the big bang is pretty well dead..
It seems to me that you have cobbled together bits and pieces of poorly understood real physics, and have decided to accept the resulting arbitrary mess as your religion. What you “choose to believe” is, of course, up to you, but it is pretty unrealistic to expect anybody else to take it seriously.
“It is pretty clear to me that a benevolent, omni-everything God does not exist because such a thing cannot exist; and yet something exists I call “God”. Many other things exist as well.”
It is pretty clear.
Yet something existsa you call god.
What?
Obviously many other things exist but a god is a special thing for which there is no objective evidence of any kind for.
What characteristics does your god have, such that you can identify it?
Can it disturb the ‘Laws of nature”
Can it insert thoughts or images into ‘minds’?
Can it affect the world?
Is it a mind?
Is it composed of something ‘immaterial’
If so, what supports it?
How does it interact with you, with itself?
Why do you belive in it?
What would make you not belive in it?
I know for a fact that you can not come up with a sensible coherent description/explanation of this thing that will not come tumbling down on any kind of close look.
Excepting of course some kind off a simple self satisfied subjective feeling type of thing.
Then, all is permissable.
That seperate burden only exists if you have a promise to God. An atheist doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t make promises to God, so your initial question regarding ‘spiritual guilt’ doesn’t exist for the atheist.
I’m glad to hear you say one has to ask forgiveness from the party that one has injured. Many Christians think that God does all the forgiving and forget to ask forgiveness from the person they have injured. Glad to hear you’re not one of those people.
Still, God (assuming He exists) can only forgive you for breaking your promise to Him. He can’t forgive your for breaking into someone’s house or stepping on someone’s toes. Yet when people ask forgiveness from God, they often ask forgiveness for sins they committed against their fellow human beings. God can’t forgive those sins.
Uh oh.
People who hear voices or have anomalous experiences which they ‘can’t explain’ are not exempt from error. And the spiritual removal of “guilt” can go many different ways. Guilt about what, and why?
I have a friend who teaches the theology of A Course in Miracles. She said that she thinks the underlying problem behind ISIS and Boko Harum is guilt. The members of those groups are feeling too much guilt. That is why they do what they do. In fact, guilt is the cause of all pain, suffering, and sickness. If we only get rid of our guilt, the world is revealed to be Perfect.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t just see this as wrong or unhelpful; I think that this can get dangerous. The usual term for “people who feel no guilt” is not “the spiritually enlightened.” It’s “sociopaths.”
Sastra wrote “the spiritual removal of guilt can go many different ways. Guilt about what, and why?”
I think that exceeds the scope of this topic, but I agree with you about “many ways”.
“I have a friend who teaches the theology of A Course in Miracles. She said that she thinks the underlying problem behind ISIS and Boko Harum is guilt.”
While that is unlikely the motivating force for a Caliphate, I can see where guilt and shame will be forces easily manipulated by groups to their own advantage.
Most commercial advertising leverages shame and guilt.
“If we only get rid of our guilt, the world is revealed to be Perfect. I don’t know about you, but I don’t just see this as wrong or unhelpful; I think that this can get dangerous.”
Quite right. Merely getting rid of guilt, sometimes through self-medication, allows wrong behavior to continue unabated and uncontrolled.
Guilt exists (IMO) to compel corrective measures; if I steal something, my guilt remains until I return the thing I have stolen. Where it is not possible to return the thing, such as if I eat your piece of pie and you really don’t want it back, there has to be a proxy or substitute; but it cannot just be waved or waived away.
That is why I find charismatic Christian religions weak; they say that if you say “I believe in Jesus” that not only are you instantly forgiven of all of your sins up to that moment, you can do whatever you want forever after with future automatic license and forgiveness.
Maybe so, but humans just are not wired that way and need an opportunity to make things right.
Manipulation of this is complex but in my experience often results from exaggeration, either by oneself or by others. In the case of moral guilt, it helps to obtain a second opinion since you might not be as guilty as you first suppose. This is especially true for people that imagine themselves guilty of capital sin (doom), such persons, thinking they have nothing to lose or cannot possibly do anything worse, then have license to do anything at all for they’ve already used up their quota of forgiveness.
I had a roommate in the Navy (if you are reading this, forgive me telling this story) who was heartbroken, that he was going to hell for committing the unpardonable sin. When I inquired, he admitted to having sex with his wife. He had gotten married and was celibate for a week or two but just couldn’t help himself.
It was amusing and tragic, mostly tragic. He had been Catholic and they put a lot of emphasis on celibacy thinking sex is a sin. Mormons consider celibacy to be the sin (if you are married, that is) and he was a newly-minted Mormon. So I arranged for him to go meet the Mormon bishop in the area and got that all straightened out.
You really don’t know of what you speak, but don’t worry. I am not expecting you to accept that merely by being told. You are far too sure of your rectitude for that. Every one of your claims (or opinions), not to mention the attitude, in the above comment are not only cliche but inaccurate as well.
“You really don’t know of what you speak”
It isn’t clear to whom you are responding. It would help if you do as I do and include a context sentence or even identify the person or handle. At first this may seem silly but when 30 responses separate your comment from what provoked your response it really isn’t clear what you mean or to whom you mean it.
As to being sure of oneself, you seem pretty certain of your own judgments. I call it confidence. It is admittedly no substitute for correctness, but when you know you are correct you might as well not hide from it.
All your moderately interesting, but banal, observations aside, there is no god.
You have almost perfect knowledge of the existence of god.
Of course, knowledge of nothing is easy.
Mapping simplistic human character traits and observations onto a phantasmagorical construct that has you enthralled is both easy and empty.
Atheists, in referring to that which is claimed as something by others, to say no, you are wrong, nothing to see here but your own internal neuronal churnings, is not referring to any actuality at all.
As mentioned, when the deluded and mistaken stop saying there is a god, we will stop saying there is not a god.
That the descriptions of the alleged god can be so absurd and obscene and that the believers extoll that nasty evil, warrants further comment on the content of the evil character of the god, without ever actually acknowledging any real existence.
“All your moderately interesting, but banal, observations aside…”
Thank you for this pointed remark to this incredibly boorish poster. It made me laugh out loud. I suspect if Jerry was not in India he would have quickly challenged this boor to provide something of substance or refrain from posting.
I have to disagree with your characterisation of Michael 2 as”incredibly boorish”. I do not agree with most of what he has to say, but at least he is polite, and responds directly to points made against him. Unfortunately he is a bit long-winded and slippery at times.
“I have a nearly perfect knowledge of the existence of god…”
Riiiight. Well, at least you got that going for you, which is nice.
“I have a nearly perfect knowledge of the existence of god”
Then you must be The One! The One who’s going to deliver that total knock-out evidence for the existence of god(s).
Sorry to be so flippant; but we’ve heard this before. Far too many times.
Please elaborate on this “nearly perfect knowledge of the existence of god”. You have eager ears here.
Michael 2:
“I have a nearly perfect knowledge of the existence of god.”
Seriousy? What makes you so sure? At any rate, you’ve overused your spots by trolling this thread so let’s stop it for a while, okay?
And as for God being the “creator of morals,” well, I guess you know more than I do.
“I have a nearly perfect knowledge of the existence of god. Seriousy? What makes you so sure?”
I have answered this in the past, I think right on your website (and a few others) but either WordPress is malfunctioning or you’ve decided your entourage is not up to the task of arguing with me.
My answer would not be useful at any rate for two reasons:
1. You cannot know whether I am truthful.
2. I do not define this god I know exists.
It is clear to me that everyone here believes in god in the way one believes in the tooth fairy, as a concept rather than having actual existence. For unclear reasons each person has his or her reasons for having hatred of this concept. I find it interesting.
Either you are delusional, “knowing” something that you won’t give us evidence for, or you think we’re too dumb to understand what you mean. I’ll give you one last chance to describe what this “nearly perfect knowledge of God is” and how you KNOW this God exists. If you don’t respond, go elsewhere, please.
“People need penance; they need to work out their transformation. It is not enough for someone to say, “Well, no big deal”, or “That’s okay, I forgive you”. You cheat people out of their opportunity to make it right.”
According to your story she didn’t do the penance you assigned her so your conclusion is incorrect.
“but if they feel spiritually guilty but deny the power or existence of god, how can that guilt be removed?”
Define “spiritually guilty” please.
How do you know all atheists feel such a thing?
Well. If the abrahamic God did exist, I actually would despise him. He is represented as being far worse than IS and the Nazis and those guys/gals at least have the excuse of being imperfect humans.
God has no such excuse.
If God did exist I would feel obliged to fight him.
Luckily, there is no sign that such a creature appeared from nothing as the theists claim.
When one of our local atheist leaders was being interviewed by the press she was asked what she’d do if she died and found out she’d been wrong and had to face God after all; she replied, “I’d spit in his face!”
I loved it; didn’t much endear us to the rest of the community, though.
Makes me think of the game “Final Fantasy xiii, lightning returns” where the main protagonist actually fights God (who, like the God of the Bible, planned to eradicate humanity and start over). A really ridiculous looking God, but a God nonetheless. I found it very satisfying. 🙂
Friends of mine tell me the FF series is full of historical in jokes (naming a Naziesque philosopher Heidegger and that sort of thing) and that sort of thing. Seems in character …
A kindred spirit of Stephen Fry’s, I think!
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Exactly! But I think good ol’ what’s-her-name (it’ll come to me in a minute) said it first; this was several years ago. Or maybe the Fry vid is also older and just resurfaced recently?
Ah, yes, Jeannine Shafer:
http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2009/01/nonbelievers_form_group_to_fos.html
To which of course the Gazette had to have a response-article:
http://www.mlive.com/opinion/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2009/02/in_this_christians_circle_ther.html
Yes, that predates Fry’s vituperation.
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I’ll bet the sentiment far pre-dates Jeannine, too. 😉 Probably the sort of response many atheists think of when confronted with such questions.
I guess the watch was too highbrow for the 21st century.
I just can’t see Dawkins writing “The Blind Coke in a Can Maker.“
What a crude and inelegant version of the watchmaker analogy. So predictable and old. But as Hitch once said with amusement, “Their arguments are old by definition.”
The can had a designer – us. We didn’t have a designer. Simples.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the designer of that can did not come up with it from nothing either (as the analogy the theist is trying to draw here would go).
That can is the product of a many-millennia-long series of trial and error attempts in engineering and science by legions of humans.
Think of it: Most basically, can designs have changed hugely just since I was a child (a few decades – an eye-blink). Before good cans (very recent thing), people preserved food is glass containers and earthenware containers. Before cans, there had to be methods of rolling sheet metal. Before that metallurgy. Before that control of heating (furnaces, etc.). Before that, simple machines. Before that agriculture, towns, non-migratory human culture, use of fire, stone tools, etc., etc.
The parallel analogy is that the world we see was “designed” (created) by a long line of gods, improving on eachother’s designs over eons. Not that Superman poofed everything into existence from nothing. Of course, both analogies are fatuous.
No doubt about it. Some people are just stupid.
False equivalence on a grand scale.
However, absence of proof is not proof of absence. Somewhere in the universe is very likely a coca-cola can, complete with barcode, that did indeed arise by accident. It would be difficult to prove otherwise.
You seem to be using “proof” here as it is used in maths, in an absolute sense. You are misusing it.
Reality is all about probabilities, not proofs. “Absence of proof is not proof of absence” is a nice saying, and trivially true. But very often it is not reasonable. If enough of the parameter space has been searched it may be very reasonable indeed to place as much confidence in a specific negative proposition as you would in the proposition that the sun will rise in the east tomorrow morning, or that there are no invisible dragons in your garage.
Typically people only believe in things for which there is no good evidence of their existence, but for which their is no absolute proof that they don’t exist, when belief in the thing in question does not have immediate consequences. Gods are easy to believe in. Invisible bridges are much more difficult.
“Typically people only believe in things for which there is no good evidence of their existence”
I also believe in things for which good evidence exists. I do not use “belief” in an exclusionary way. If I know something, I also believe it. But if I believe something, I might not have actual knowledge of it.
Belief and knowledge do not occupy the same part of a brain (IMO). It is conceivably possible to “know” something and NOT believe it although I cannot think of an example.
I suppose its motivational or emotive power separates them. What I believe creates feelings and motivates decision, what I know does not. I know that 2 + 2 = 4, but that does not provoke action.
But I believe I am hungry. yes, I am, so I am going to go eat something. It provokes behavior.
Actually, absence of proof (or evidence) is proof (or evidence) of absence.
The proof (see what I did there?) ishere.
Very nice page, thanks!
Actually, we discussed this in my Philosophical Fundamentals class (almost) years ago. Professor McCall put this question to the seminar: “Is there somewhere, not on Earth, a river of Coke?”
And the answer is, according to many, *no*. And we can be certain of that. Why? Because Coke has an essential origin: it must be made by the Coca-Cola company headquartered in Atlanta, or whatever it is.
(A more obvious example: there is nowhere, not on Earth, where there is a United States dollar bill – until an astronaut leaves one on Mars or something.)
You can deny that essentiality of origin is important to either Coke, the can or the dollar bill, but then one is owed a story about what things do or do not have essentiality of origin, and why.
(Note: I do not know what I think myself, even though this is an interesting question in metaphysics of technology – my field!)
Of course, in a general sense, evolution actually did produce that can of coke, and the 747s, and all the watches preachers have ever invoked. The problem with the cartoon is merely the childish mechanism proposed, not the actual fact.
“scientists have an ulterior motivation for denying the obvious fact that life didn’t evolve, but was created by God. What ulterior motive could we have for that?”
To escape the shackles of the Spanish Inquisition, once literally and now figuratively. Science isn’t exactly the enemy of religion per se, but is certainly the enemy of certain churches.
Anyway, with regard to the Coke can, Obama says “you didn’t build that!” so maybe it built itself.
You must enjoy throwing together different lines of disconnected material to make an argument or point that no one gets. From the Spanish Inquisition to Obama says?
Let’s stick with just evolution and forget the silly coke can joke.
“…point that no one gets”
Or just you. What is your explanation for the ulterior motive that might exist?
Because the Spanish Inquisition was such an issue in 19th century England that Darwin needed to invent evolution.
Whoever built a coke can didn’t really build it, in Obamas sense.
Much work on cans had already been done.
Aluminum had to discovered and manufactured.
The pop top had to developed.
It was invented but as a collaborative, historical, social process, which was what Obama was getting at.
“It was invented but as a collaborative, historical, social process, which was what Obama was getting at.”
And then someone, a human person, takes all that and builds a Coke can! If that person did not do so, Coke cans won’t exist; they do not “build themselves”.
When a Boy Scout works on an Eagle project, most of the work is done by volunteers; but he chose the project, coordinated with providers of materials, obtained permits from the city where needed, organized the volunteers and provided incentives to work,makes sure the work is done safely and correctly, then reports to the beneficiary and obtains an approval signature.
Science fiction writer Poul Anderson wrote (I think he is the author of) “The Man Who Counts” on this very topic. He is the one that sets things in motion, sees a goal and how to reach it; using other people and things to achieve it. He is the one without whom that did NOT get built.
And?
It still didn’t build itself.
I don’t think anything you said negates what I said.
There are a multitude of variations on this theme, from individual brilliance to inevitable consequences of prior discoveries and refinements.
One discussion is that of just rewards.
I think Obama was arguing against a certain libertarian type notion of individual desert with an inadequate appreciaion of social contributions.
The man who counts is but one of many things that count.
(I may try and read that story, sounds interesting)
What? It was denying that a god exists that got people into trouble with the inquisition. If scientists had wanted to escape the inquisition they would’ve had to have pretended to believe in (a) god.
Obama’s point was that no one person accomplished something with large-scale significance all by him or her self. Complicated endeavors are always the result of cooperation, and since life requires that we accomplish all sorts of complicated endeavors, we had all better cooperate. That includes paying taxes.
“The usual one suggested is that it helps buttress atheism”
Why would we want to buttress atheism? There a much stronger, and more demonstrable argument to be made against a theistic, rather than deistic creator god. So if we just want to be able to sin, it would be easier to just point out the lack of evidence for religious claims.
“it would be easier to just point out the lack of evidence for religious claims.”
That is weak atheism. Strong atheism is its own kind of religion that sees other religions as competitors and actively tries to stamp out all religions but itself: I am right, you are wrong.
It’s just a variant of Darwinism; seeking food, shelter and breeding rights.
Religion is just another ideological system like communism or fascism, irrational and non-evidence based, although in the case of the later 2, they make specific claims about the here and now and are easier to refute.
Being unwilling the accept the truth value of a proposition without sufficient evidence is not an ideology, and there are no weak or strong variants of this position, except in the deluded minds of believers who seek to smear those who refuse to accept their odious beliefs and drag them down to their own debased level.
“Being unwilling the accept the truth value of a proposition without sufficient evidence is not an ideology, and there are no weak or strong variants of this position, ”
That is correct. You are describing a single proposition, that of lacking belief.
The strong variant has a belief and asserts it as a truth statement.
There is a big difference between “I’m right, you’re wrong — let’s talk” and “You’re wrong, God’s right, end of discussion.”
Always said with the implied “You’re wrong, God’s right, I speak for god, end of discussion.”
“It’s just a variant of Darwinism; seeking food, shelter and breeding rights.”
Unfortunately, you don’t know what the term “Darwinian” means. Your religion is by nature authoritarian, so you assume that the whole of science similarly rests on an appeal to an ideological authority like Charles Darwin. It doesn’t. But you won’t know about any of that until you inform yourself about the ideas you want to criticize.
+1
Yakaru writes “you don’t know what the term Darwinian means.”
I know what it means to me. I use it as a proxy word for a vast realm of natural selection, competitive strategies and so on, which we are engaged in right now.
The “Darwin Awards” are given, usually posthumously, to persons who have improved society by removing themselves from the gene pool.
Being right is good, being wrong is bad, so we are here spending rather a lot of time making other people wrong; for if they are wrong, we must be right, hence good, hence better breeding stock. You might not think that way because thinking happens in the cerebral cortex but your desire to breed is probably limbic or amygdala based.
“Your religion is by nature authoritarian”
Quite right. Religion is, among other things, just a word that means a moral authority. It cannot fail to be authoritarian for it then also ceases to be a religion.
“so you assume that the whole of science similarly rests on an appeal to an ideological authority like Charles Darwin.”
I do not assert or believe that science is this single thing with a pointy end resting on a source of science.
Darwin is recognized as being central to one of several important inflection points on the otherwise gradual progress of science.
If I measure temperature I have just performed science. It is very uncomplicated and has no more appeal to ideology than I want to know the temperature so I know how to dress for the day.
“But you won’t know about any of that until you inform yourself about the ideas you want to criticize.”
I am informing and you are criticizing.
“I know what it means to me…”
That’s not what it means in the English language, and you demonstrate that you don’t understand it. You can’t criticize something you don’t understand. You started off criticizing the idea of evolution and accusing, but now you are instead “informing” people of your views, which are unfortunately unrelated to evolution.
The Darwin Awards, incidentally, are a joke, (in poor taste, in my opinion) which are not based on Darwinism. The kind of stupidity it features is not genetically determined, nor would its inventors insist it is.
Similarly, with ideas, it is not a Darwinian struggle, in the biological sense, to disagree with someone — and you seem rather unaware of how competitive or combative your ill-informed comments here are, incidentally.
Science does have authority, but it is different in nature from that of religion. From your comments I notice you don’t understand it.
“I know what it means to me.”
Humpty, is that you?
On a previous thread, Michael 2 took the identification with Humpty as a compliment. But then assumed the persona of the White Queen.
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When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead…
… it’s magic mushroom time 😉
cr
Further, the point of arguing against theism is not to “make them wrong”. The point is hopefully to correct them, so that they don’t do things like keep their own children uneducated, or impede the education of others’ children in public schools, or enact anti-gay legislation, or etc, etc, etc.
“You started off criticizing the idea of evolution”
Really? Where did I do that? Search carefully!
Here, for example:
“Being right is good, being wrong is bad, so we are here spending rather a lot of time making other people wrong; for if they are wrong, we must be right, hence good, hence better breeding stock.”
And your understanding of what “darwinian” means would have been wrong had you had you said it 1860. And since then there has been 116 years of research that you missed. And you think you are here to “inform” people.
*156 years*
Well, Mike the second, you sure have a lot of assertions you seem anxious to share. What you’re light on are facts and sound arguments to support them.
“What you’re light on are facts and sound arguments to support them.”
Quite right. I have as simple an outlook as you. If God exists (as usually described) and wanted you to know it, you would.
You don’t, so he either doesn’t exist or is not as usually described. Not existing is a simple but possibly erroneous conclusion.
That leaves “not as usually described”. Hence my interest in exploring the edges.
When I explore a mountain, I usually start with the edges. That reveals the boundaries of it.
When I resolve errors in a computer program, find the boundary conditions; that is where the errors are going to be.
To understand my own religion, I go to the edges and boundaries.
Do tell, oh sensei. What wisdom to behold have you gleaned from your explorations at the “edge of god” that might enlighten us poor mortals?
“What wisdom to behold have you gleaned from your explorations at the edge of god that might enlighten us poor mortals?”
Well it is more at the boundary between god and atheism but I take your meaning (I think).
We are each on a path through life that will develop each of us in ways that a different path likely would not. You cannot follow my path and I cannot follow yours.
On the other hand, your path obviously includes crossing mine where we share ideas; some of mine will stick to you and some of yours will stick to me.
Pray tell, what did god look like from the edge? What did he/she/it sound like? Did edge-god speak to you in English? Or did the two of you work out some private, non-sensory mode of communication?
If so, do you have any insight into the physical processes by which this communication took place — i.e., how it resulted in the electro-chemical activity in your brain through which you understood and remember the communication? And what makes you sure that this communication involved this entity you call “god,” rather than resulting solely from the electro-chemical activity occurring within your own skull?
“We are each on a path through life that will develop each of us in ways that a different path likely would not.”
I hope this isn’t the sum of your, “nearly perfect knowledge of the existence of god.”
Hooray for deepities!
Stamping out harmful evil wrongs is a noble pursuit but not a religion.
The religious can’t quite grasp what not having religion is like so they map what limited erroneous comprehensions of others mental states are on to how they understand things, erroniously.
“Stamping out harmful evil wrongs is a noble pursuit but not a religion.”
It requires, or instantiates on the moment, a religion so as to know what is harmful evil and wrong.
Otherwise whatever you are stamping out is merely things you don’t like.
“Otherwise whatever you are stamping out is merely things you don’t like.” Sorry, Mike, but while religious folks are terrified by that idea, the reality is that morality is just a social compact created by human beings in a particular culture at a particular place and time. Although religious folks like to claim that there is some immutable morality to be derived from the supposed proclamations of their gods, we know that to be complete bunk given that the immutable morality of centuries ago (sanctioning slavery, god-ordered genocide, misogyny, and the stoning of disobedient children and non-virginal wives) is now roundly condemned by the heirs of the very same religious traditions that originally declared those atrocities to be moral. Of course it’s just my opinion (since there is no immutable morality), but I’m inclined to think that our modern man-made laws have vastly improved upon the cruel and callous morality recited in the most widely known books of religious fairy tales.
One most certainly does not need religion to determine harmful evil wrongs.
Using religion for that purpose is evil.
Religion can not provide any valid moral grounds, despite this being the continuing grand claim. Because,religion is based on falsity.
Moral development has happend despite religion.
Religion is useful for subsuming or bypassing otherwise moral considerations.
There is more to moral considerations than things I don’t like. That is the thing about morals and ethics.
It is not for me to stamp out things I don’t like, without proper moral consideration.
Atheism is not a religion. Full stop.
Atheism does not accept silly stories, that’s it.
Atheists (atheism) do(es) not accept the supernatural. If you strip the term “religion” of the belief in the supernatural (as you are proposing here), then you have rendered the term meaningless. We use the term “religion” to indicate belief in the supernatural (in some form or other; religions do vary widely).
You can’t make up your own meanings to words (and expect others to accept them).
You can stamp your foot and say “I’m right, you’re wrong” to your heart’s content. Atheism is not a religion.
Atheism is not a religion, just like lying on the couch is not a sport, or being dead is not a way of living.
His Coke can analogy displays his utter lack of awareness of the role of the natural processes resulting from the laws of physics. We don’t (currently) know of any collection of natural processes that could plausibly create a Coke can. On the other hand, we have a very solid understanding of natural processes that could plausibly underpin evolution. My cocktail party response to people who make this inane analogy (or, more often, the infamous 747 analogy) is to pull a coin from my pocket and point out that there are infinite trajectories that the coin could take once I let go of it, such that it is absolutely ridiculous for scientists to claim that it will fall to the ground — unless, of course, you’re intelligent enough to have an awareness of the natural process of gravity.
This cartoon reminds me of the Dr. Steven Meyer portion of the debate with Lawrence Krauss. He had some problems with his computer presentation, then proceeded to rehash all the same ID/Creation ideas and confuse even himself with too much math. He gave everyone, including his truly, a large headache.
Meyer seemed to be stricken with intermittent bouts of aphasia in that debate.
Yes, he was. Transient aphasia is a migraine symptom usually happening prior to the migraine though I’ve had it throughout as well.
I’m sure that most people here know that the coke can analogy fails because organic beings and manufactured articles are two entirely different things.
In any case, I am quite willing to entertain the idea of some kind of creative intelligence if anyone were to present some evidence for it. However, I think that it is highly unlikely that this creative intelligence is a character from a collection of bronze age folk tales.
I don’t understand how theists who think “atheists” pretend there is no God so they aren’t “accountable” to Him explain why atheists don’t simply believe in a different god. After all, there are many versions of god, including ones which come with infinite love and no rules at all, ones which involve an afterlife of bliss and magic psychic powers here on earth. And then one can use this “God” to support and buttress up anything one wants, being special and enlightened while claiming humility the entire time.
Why would “atheists” go through all the science and reason? Why invoke a physical world with no afterlife and no cosmic meaning? Why limit the way we seek forgiveness to rectifying the harm we’ve done?
In other words — why do it hard when it’s so easy to do it soft? Both ways would work equally well at “pretending to not know the REAL God.” But only one way gives a person a sense of ultimate power and control without reasonable accountability or any mental work or challenges.
And it’s not atheism.
“But only one way gives a person a sense of ultimate power and control without reasonable accountability or any mental work or challenges.”
Dawkins and Hitchens seem to have gotten something out of their evangelism; they have many followers and purchasers of their books.
There can be no accountability when the argument cannot be proven true or false (theirs or theists).
Anyway, I suspect many ways exist to give a person a sense of power. I get some by commenting right here. It’s not ultimate power of course; more like flexing a small muscle so it doesn’t atrophy from disuse.
I think you misunderstand. Fair profit and moderate advantage hardly entail power run amok (as I’m sure you’ll agree.) And humanists like Dawkins don’t hold Absolute Certainty as the standard for reasonable belief (as I suspect you’ll agree.) That quote refers to the calm assurance that comes from standing behind God or Spirit and knowing that your power and understanding now comes from God. Atheists can’t claim this. We are accountable to each other.
Those who do claim that, however, are now only limited by what limits God. And God is not accountable to anyone.
Which still leaves the question. Consider, as an example, New Age. It contains an afterlife, special revelations, paranormal abilities, and the blithe conviction that we are all God manifesting Itself — with the “enlightened” more fit to judge and rule than the blighted Mormons and atheists, say. Science and reason can’t hold you back because you’ve ‘transcended’ them. You ARE God. There is no “death.” Everything which happens, happens for the best — no matter how sketchy or dubious that seems to those still fixated in the world.
If atheists were just looking for a way to avoid personal responsibility, this would seem to be the smartest choice. Talk about an easy way out of not just the Christian God, but pretty much every rational restriction whatsoever! And yet … we remain atheists. We die as we live, weak and uncertain, and then we are gone.
If you ask us our reasons, our response is that this is what we have concluded to be true, like it or not. But theists who believe that atheists know Christian Truth but pretend otherwise don’t really have a reason why we don’t just pretend something more to our advantage, and pleasanter. It’s not as if the only alternative to conservative or traditional Christianity is atheism.
“Consider, as an example, New Age. It contains an afterlife, special revelations, paranormal abilities, and the blithe conviction that we are all God manifesting Itself”
You have described my mother. Slipperier than a wet bar of soap.
“If atheists were just looking for a way to avoid personal responsibility, this would seem to be the smartest choice.”
Agreed. So atheists aren’t doing that, or so one might assume, but are on some sort of mission that isn’t easy.
Non-theists, such as my father, aren’t really interested in challenging theists. It is a pointless exercise wasting time for thousands of years with no end in sight. That works both ways of course.
Might end up with sarcasm fail here. The narrative sounds just like the Bible’s account of creation, so the rubes might actually believe it.
Ulterior Motive?
No doubt a conspiracy to hide “The Truth” from us.
Hardly surprising that people who are paranoid enough to think they are being watched by god all the time are easily seduced into believing a critic has an “ulterior motive”
The Coca Cola story is well known and is backed by evidence of its “evolution” from idea to the latest production, so its use in the context above is silly.
Religious Creationism aka intelligent design is without any evidence but shockingly meme-wise, has evolved.
What’s their line in the next century or so?
Yes, we humans know how life began and can repeat the process but god didn’t do it THAT way!
Endless twaddle.
I recently subjected myself to (and boy, was I offended! 🙂 ) to a thingie on Facebook posted by a relative.
Basically it went: Atheists mock us; but look how stupid they are, They think everything came from nothing! Ha Ha Ha!
Like so many things of this nature, it’s not even wrong.
“They think everything came from nothing! Ha Ha Ha! Like so many things of this nature, it’s not even wrong”
Oh? How did you discover that everything came from nothing? The big bang originated from a singularity, or so it seems (no proof yet), but it was *something* and it contained all the matter and energy this Universe now contains.
Your idea of nothing and mine seem to differ.
I don’t think you’ve parsed jblilie’s comment properly: It was the theists that he/she was quoting who think that atheists think that everything came from nothing.
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Correct.
I thought this seemed like something from the intelligence level of Ray Comfort, and alas it is.
Here’s the source: http://cedricstudio.com/2016/01/atheist-test/
And you can have your own copy from Living Waters…for $8! Hurry now while supplies last.
And just like coke, religions’ gods make ‘children’ go into a state of sugery delirium.
Ah, that childhoods “sugar rush” is apparently a myth. People see — and create — what they expect.
No surprise to us.
Religion is perhaps more like the ad campaign, I think. In this case, the one where the Real Thing teaches the world to sing in perfect harmony.
Yeah, I bite my tongue when other parents attribute hyper behaviour, at birthday parties etc, to sugar. (When it’s easily ascribed to the natural excitement of kids together especially
in special gatherings. I was just a parent helper for a school trip
for 12 days in Euope and the kids were regularly going nuts. Because..they were excited, and it becomes like an excitement echoe chamber.
But this sugar rush myth is so taken for granted I feel like “that guy” if I were to undermine it.
Thanks, Sastra!! Now I have an earworm. 🙁
Even Coke Zero, which contains no sugar at all…
Adrenalin might be a more valid explanation.
cr
This, again, is why I don’t like to presume dishonesty on the other side of a debate. Everyone thinks some things they believe, or
argue for, iatr so reasonable or obvious that only people with
“ulterior motives” could continue to reject the position.
Does anyone deny the can had a designer? No, even a fool knows it. So the correct answer would be c, if there were in fact anyone who denied it. There isn’t. So what?
I deny that the can had A designer. The can had a large number of designers, not a single one of whom understood everything about how the can came to be.
“C. Has an ulterior motive for denying the obvious”
Essentially, this type of thinking stems from the conviction that one’s opinion on a subject must be correct to the extent that he/she cannot understand how other people do not agree with his/her opinion. Instead of accepting that they may be wrong or that it is possible that other people can honestly have a differing opinion, they come up with ridiculous reasons why other people have a different opinion. This is not unique to theism; we see it with atheists as well. Examples include: “Accommodationists (or religious scientists) cannot honestly believe that religion and science are compatible – they are performing doublethink to avoid psychological damage and/or they are taking the position to appease the public into supporting science!” “Atheists who argue that religion has good properties and disagree with the New Atheists on certain points are almost certainly just jealous of the New Atheist’s success and popularity!” When one cannot or will not understand why other people hold contradictory or even different opinions than themselves, they assume that the other people are intellectually dishonest.
In terms of Christianity, in Romans 1:20, Paul states “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” This is probably where the writer of the ‘Atheist Test’ is coming from – God is so evident that anyone who doesn’t believe in Him must have an ulterior motive.
The main reason we can spot design is not brute complexity or regularity. It’s because of our prior experience with designed things. We recognize elements of design we’re already familiar with, even if we’re not familiar with the entire object in question.
There are many naturally occurring phenomena that we might mistake for being designed if complexity or regularity were the only criteria; likewise there are designed objects that we might be totally unfamiliar with and would prompt us to conclude weren’t designed.
What? No “Michael 2” coffee mugs or tee-shirts on offer? No self-published “Edge of God” manifesto? No workshops or webinars or actualization consultations?
I am disappoint.
If everything have to be designed, who designed the designer? It’s actually a variant of the fallacious Cosmological or First Cause argument.
Besides, we see many “blind” natural processes happen, erosion for example. Unless one sees the eroding force to be god’s scalpel. But even then, one would have to show how to recognize a designed coastline from a non-designed one.
have -> has
Also, musical beef beat me to the design recognition.
I’ll make me some tea now. 🙂
Slartibartfast could help you with that one. Especially Fjords.
Beam me up Scottie. !
Heh.
This explains the problem with biological classification for vending machines in natural history museums.
I’ve never understood what the internal logic of the supposed “ulterior motive” is supposed to be. If I truly knew that this omniscient, judgmental god actually existed, how could I possibly think I was getting away with anything by pretending that he didn’t exist?
I think the familiar situation they’re comparing this to is the one where small, hostile, naughty little children pretend they don’t see you standing there and didn’t hear you say “no.” They just reach for the cookie and grab. Maybe their immature brains think that if they don’t want something to happen, maybe it won’t happen. Or rebellion feels so good.
Atheists are supposed to be like that. Only we’re hostile, naughty adults and thus held accountable.
Or — maybe we’re just the Bad Guys: we’re internally dead and going through the motions to advance the plot line of someone else. There’s no internal logic if we’re a device. Of course, then there’s the little problem with our ‘accountability.’
Frankly, I don’t think Authoritarians bother to think too much about the other tribe and their possible similarities to their own. Couple that with a supernatural framework where literally anything goes and it’s a prize-winning recipe for unconcern.
The coke can example is interesting because cans DO come from a kind of evolution.
Aluminum cans, like all engineered objects, are the result of a long process of incremental improvement. It’s not exactly the same kind of incremental improvement as seen in nature, but it’s similar. Devices evolve like this because even now they are too complex for any person to perfect them on the first try, or for any person to understand all the market conditions that will influence their “fitness”.
Aluminum cans now are 40% less massive than ones of similar volume being sold in 1970, and this improvement is due to a long series of very tiny steps shaving off a small fraction of a gram here or there.
William —
I’m afraid the term “religion” is very elastic, even capricious, and allows a great variety of definitions.
“Religion” is often indiscriminately applied to any worldview or lifestance, whether or not that lifestance meets any rigorous definition of the term.
Your example is a good one. Wikipedia notes that here “‘religious’ is understood in general terms, separate from established traditions, in designating feelings and concerns (e.g. gratitude, wonder, humility, compassion) that are often described as spiritual or religious…” One of the tropes on this website is that well-established religions have laid so firm a claim to these states of mind that it is hard to escape the conviction that they cannot exist outside the framework of a religion — a conviction which is nevertheless entirely bogus.
More careful writers, such as philosopher A. C. Grayling, set out a more narrow view of religion as a lifestance whose adherents purport to have some mutually (if not symmetrically) beneficial relationship with a supernatural entity. He notes, for example, that “Buddhism in its original form is not a religion but a philosophy. The distinction between a religion and a philosophy is important and clear, and applies to other philosophies wrongly described as religions, such as Daoism, Confucianism and Mohism in China, Stoicism in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, and others.”
Humanism is not a religion in this sense.
U.S. law’s definition of humanism as a religion is only legislative pragmatism, without any dominion over philosophy. IIRC, the intent was to provide humanists with the same rights under law as adherents of any religion in a traditional sense, without having to rewrite statutes to include “religions and other lifestances” where they had “religions”.
In any case, atheism is only a single assertion — “I believe in no gods.” It lacks the complexity necessary to be a lifestance. (At the risk of introducing a red herring, I disagree with jblilie that /all/ atheists do not believe in the supernatural. Folks that believe in no gods can nevertheless still swallow all kinds of woo.)
And evolution is (a) a set of natural processes and (b) a firmly established theory that explains those processes. It is hard to see how either sense fits any normal definition of religion, even in the metaphorical sense of a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance (e.g., “football is his religion”) — it would really be “evolutionary biology is her religion”.
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“In any case, atheism is only a single assertion — I believe in no gods.”
With websites devoted to not believing!
Websites are your criterion for religion? So Google, the New York Times, and General Motors are religions too?
At best, you are confusing religion with a movement.
William wrote (in my inbox):
Wunold wrote, “In any case, atheism is only a single assertion — I believe in no gods.”
Ant wrote that, not me.
Some (rather few) people who happen to be atheists have websites devoted to a wide variety of diverse interests. This website is “devoted” to all sorts of things: evolutionary biology, cats, noms, jazz and other music, cowboy boots … and sometimes the ills of religion (but rarely to “not believing” as such!).
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Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse all creative spellings.
>
“I believe in no gods.”
Ant, in order to pre-empt deliberate Goddy misunderstandings of the word ‘believe’ there, would you agree that that might be better phrased as “I do not believe in any gods” ?
(It would appear, from my inbox, that William-whose-posts-never-appear-on-this-page has already made such a misinterpretation).
cr
I think thegarlicks (below) is correct in his supposition.
We thus have the paradoxical situation that William can make assertions (in everyone’s inbox) which, since they don’t appear on this page, nobody can counter. (Gotta love the irony!) I think I’ll sieze the initiative and risk managerial displeasure by quoting William in order to refute him.
William (in my inbox) said: “It wouldn’t make a difference which way you phrased it. You are still saying exactly the same thing, only phrasing it another way. Very slippery tactics, but I suppose that kind of dishonesty is to be expected. Incidentally, why do not my posts show up on this page?”
Not the same thing at all. “I believe in no gods” could, quite grammatically, have either of two meanings:
1. ‘I believe that there are no gods’. Positive statement of the non-existence of gods. (Also including the magic word ‘believe’ which as I noted, Goddists love to harp on about).
2. ‘I do not believe in any gods’. Does not require me to prove their non-existence, or in fact to believe anything. It puts the onus on the Goddists to produce evidence.
William’s third sentence might offend me but I can’t be bothered. His fourth sentence is probably answered by the tone of his third.
(Hoping the management will forgive me if I have in fact transgressed.)
cr
Yes — i /wanted/ it to be amenable to both those interpretations — “strong” as well as “weak” atheism (as they’re sometimes called).
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I would be interested to hear this from William as he continues to twists words to his conclusions: Are there things in your personal life you don’t believe in?
From William:
* I don’t believe in the sphagetti monster.
* I also don’t believe in the kind of change posited by evolutionary biology […]
* I also don’t believe I am twisting anybody’s words.
I’ll use your own logic and apply it to the first item above:
“I believe there is no spaghetti monster – therefore you have reasons, real or imagined, to assert ‘there is no spaghetti monster’ to believe in.”
And,
“I do not believe in the spaghetti monster – therefore, you have reasons, real or imagined, as to why you choose not to believe in the spaghetti monster, whether it exists or not.
And finally,
“The last state is worse than the first, because it is a deliberate statement of stubborn resistance to the existence of the spaghetti monster, whether that existence is confirmed or not.”
Therefore, I would like to welcome you to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Welcome!
From William:
“So, what you’re trying to say is, you have evidence that the flying sphagetti monster exists? What is this evidence? Is it really made of sphagetti?”
The onus is on you to prove that the flying spaghetti monster does not exist.
(I’m simply trying to play by your own rules and logic.)
Yes, please provide with me the evidence you have that the flying spaghetti monster does not exist. Thanks.
From William:
“If the FSM is made of sphagetti, that would be a contradiction because sphagetti doesn’t fly. Also, sphagetti is made of matter. Since matter does not create itself, how did the FSM come into being? It would have had to create the raw materials of which it is composed before it even existed, which is a contradiction”
According to the Flying Spaghetti Monster: “We believe the Flying Spaghetti Monster created the world much as it exists today, but for reasons unknown made it appear that the universe is billions of years old (instead of thousands) and that life evolved into its current state (rather than created in its current form). Every time a researcher carries out an experiment that appears to confirm one of these “scientific theories” supporting an old earth and evolution we can be sure that the FSM is there, modifying the data with his Noodly Appendage. We don’t know why He does this but we believe He does, that is our Faith.”
The FSM is an eternal being. He was there from the beginning. He can create however he likes. We simply can’t understand his infinite ways. He lives outside of space and time and therefore is not subjected to our standards. A day is like 10,000 years to him. We are but mere mortals.
Also, how do you know the raw materials weren’t there before he existed. Were you there?
From William:
“Didn’t have to be. Natural laws confirm, and most will agree, matter can not create itself and therefore it must have had a beginning. So FSM had no materials from which to mould his “noodly appendage” that allegedly modifies data, unless FSM created itself. Which is a contradiction. If all of that isn’t enough to convince you, maybe Henderson’s own admission that he created the FSM (note that – the FSM did not create Henderson) for his own amusement to antagonise creationists should be conclusive enough. I really don’t see what your point is. All this does not prove God doesn’t exist, neither does it provide any support for atheism or evolution. In fact, it contradicts that position. I think the burden of proof still lies with you.”
The FSM is infinite in his being. He is not constrained to our natural laws. He is outside of space and time. Science can’t say anything in this matter. The FSM always existed.
In the beginning there was the FSM. There is no contradiction. Everything created requires a creator, except the FSM – he is exempt. He is the first cause that created everything else.
I believe that Henderson is confused. The FSM loves us so much that he spoke through Henderson to share with us how much he loves us and wants to have a relationship with us.
So, given all of this “evidence”, you still haven’t proven that the FSM doesn’t exist, therefore he exists. And, as you’ve already mentioned, you can’t have a non-belief in him, because your non-belief is in fact a belief. Therefore you are a Pastafarian. Again, welcome to the church of the flying spaghetti monster!
According to William (in my inbox), he is a follower of the the religions of Apastafarianism and Aevolutionism.
By his own logic, he’s part of an infinite number of religions of non-beliefs.
That would be correct. Can’t say I believe in any of those things. I’d there is indeed an infinite number of things not to believe in, then I must be part of it. What’s your point?
By your own logic, it’s not possible for you to not believe in any of them. The onus is on you to prove that everything you don’t believe in doesn’t exist.
+1
Sent from my iPhone. Please excuse all creative spellings.
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William-in-my-mailbox said, in part:
‘2. I do not believe in any gods – therefore, you have reasons, real or imagined, as to why you do not choose to believe in any gods, whether they exist or not.
The last state is worse than the first, because it is a deliberate statement of stubborn resistance to the existence of gods, whether that existence is confirmed or not. It is more like “I will not believe, no matter what you say”.’
No, that is absolutely incorrect.
“I do not believe in any gods” is a simple statement of fact. It would be equally true whether ‘I’ would adamantly resist any possible proof, or whether ‘I’ would instantly accept any good proof of a god.
Stop projecting your imaginary constructs on to us.
Further, you seem to imagine that your god, whatever it is, is some sort of default option that it takes effort not to believe in. WRONG. I don’t need to make any effort at all to not-believe in [whatever your god is], or Jehovah, or Allah, or Zeus, or Osiris, or Anoia, or Cthulhu, or Xenu…
cr
Just to be clear, the imaginary construct I was referring to was William’s concept of what an atheist is. (I was not referring to the Flying Spaghetti Monster or Jesus).
cr
That could be misunderstood in a different way! I was trying to avoid a definition that included “lack” (which is common used, but suggests that that belief in god[s] is something we /should/ have).
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So, I guess you are deleting him; it’s just we who receive WEIT updates via email (i.e., most of us) who think William is still with us. 🙂 (Does he not know he’s under moderation?)
William (in my inbox) doesn’t know how ignorant he sounds. He eats spaghetti, though, so he must believe in the FSM, despite his saying otherwise.
And he fancies his views constitute a threat to “general materialism”.
William wrote: « That single statement of faith is the only criterion necessary for atheism to qualify as a religion not unlike any other. It is comparable to the single statement of faith in the Christian religion, “I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ”. »
That’s necessary but hardly sufficient. The Nicene creed says rather more than that.
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WIMIB writes: « The basis for the Christian religion is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is absolutely sufficient, .⦠»
That cannot be sufficient as it is logically possible for someone to believe that Jesus was resurrected /without/ being a Christian. Many Christians believe that Satan exists, but that does not make them Satanists!! ð
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You know, folks, there is a reason that William-in-my-mailbox is missing on this page. Such folk can’t be reasoned with. They fail to see the symmetry between their deity and all others, including our Lord, the FSM. (May pasta be upon him.)
William-in-my-mailbox is short in the self-awareness department.
He says the reason he is confined to my mailbox is that we fear his ability to demonstrate the complete lack of symmetry between the FSM and his jesus god.
This is getting boring.
From William:
“Then, following your logic, you can not be an atheist and have a non-belief in God, because your non-belief is a belief. Also you have not proven that God doesn’t exist by claiming the FSM exists, so therefore, God and the FSM both exist. Your logic is falling apart and becoming tedious. You have run around in circles and arrived at the place where you started, having contradicted yourself all over the place. I’m afraid there is no point to this exercise, other than to demonstrate how absolutely hopeless your case for atheism/evolution is.”
I deny your evidence that the FSM doesn’t exist, as he is outside of space and time and you have not provided any evidence to prove that wrong. He is the first cause. The unmoved mover. He created everything from nothing. He has planted evidence to confuse you from knowing the truth.
I should re-iterate that this is not my logic. It was you who said our non-belief in your specific God was not possible, because our non-belief was “like a religion.” I have been using your logic to argue the existence of the FSM. It worked, as you have said that both God and the FSM exist. You’ve also highlighted your own contradictions and circular reasoning.
So, thank you.
WIMIB wrote: you already KNOW FSM is a total fabrication which nobody really cares about.
But WE already KNOW ALL GODS are total fabrications. The only difference is that many people care about one or a few of them
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WIMIB asks me to confirm: “1) Jesus Christ is not who he says he is 2) He was not raised from the tomb.”
William, you have the burden of proof exactly backwards. It is not even /certain/ that the Jesus you speak of even existed. And for (1) – and possibly (2) – to be true, you need to posit a god that can both intercede in the natural world (miraculously impregnating a young girl) /and/ exist before the Big Bang (“fiat lux”), which is inconsistent with physics as we now understand it (with five-sigma confidence).
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William,
Your reply was perfect. Thank you.
Peace,
Nate
In regards do evidence to Ant:
Can you provide a list of citations for all of your claims made? I am interested in the non-biblical primary sources. I am already aware of the contradictions in the biblical source.
Thanks.
nate —
I’d direct you to multiple posts on this website. Putting “historicity” into the Search field at top left should turn up many of them. The posts will lead you to the primary sources.
William’s claims that “it is unanimously accepted that Jesus is an historical figure” and “historians unanimously agree that [Jesus Christ] lived in Palestine 2000 years ago” are manifestly /wrong/ as there are historians who contest that and many others who have no scholarly opinion on the matter at all. IIRC, the earliest documentary evidence dates from at least 50, probably 80, years after the fact, so claims of “eye witnesses” &c. are bogus — it’s simply hearsay. Nobody at the time was making a claim about the resurrection for the authorities to refute!
On any case, even if Jesus /were/ a historical character, William still has to prove that He was who He says He was — i.e., the son of God. Good luck with that.
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William,
You started with an absolute – it was unanimous that everyone agreed that Jesus was an historical figure and he lived in Palestine. Now you say “there are only few critics.” What changed in the past day to change your statement?
Ant,
Thank you for your response.
I am aware of many of the different sources, but wanted to cross reference my list with what William is referring to. He’s appealing to authorities and I would like to know the authorities he is referencing.
Prior to my leaving Christianity I received a degree from a Christian University where I studied these topics at length and did many exegetical studies. I simply want to compare notes with William.
nate —
Well, I think there’s the nub of the problem. William is appealing to authority. I am appealing for evidence — extraordinary evidence to support extraordinary claims (the “fact” of the empty tomb) — and finding very thin gruel indeed.
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Who are these eye witness sources you are citing? And can you site sources that are independent of biblical references. Any Roman references at the time? Given the importance of such an event, the government at the time must have taken note of it.
This was a reply to “William-in-my-inbox”, I take it. His comments don’t seem to be appearing … (or staying) … except in email.
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Yes, you are probably right. I’ve been replying and reading through my inbox as well.
William,
You make many absolute truth claims. I have read many of your citations, and no, it’s not “unanimous”, a “universal consensus”, or “absolutely no doubt.” You are making a leap from “this man exists” to “since he exists, therefore he is the son of god!”.
You are being outright dishonest.
I don’t believe what people in 2016 tell me, I believe in the evidence they have shown. The evidence that is repeatable and peer-reviewed. The evidence that leads to great tools like http://bibviz.com that allow us to visualize the many contradictions in the bible which you say do not exist.
Diana,
I would not spend much more time on this topic. I have, admittedly, already spent too much time to simply watch the enormous amount of special pleading and dishonesty on behalf of William.
William – you’re gish galloping. The reason one looks for sources extraneous to the bible is to strengthen the evidence of Jesus’s existence. The same standard is applied to other figures in antiquity. Indeed, we know Caesar existed because many sources show that to be the case.
So, please answer my question – what sources are you referencing that show Jesus existed. Please cite your sources. It doesn’t do to assert that they exist. This is the same standard applied to all evidence in an academic setting.
William,
You are being intellectually dishonest. This makes it very hard to have a conversation with you.
* You tell atheists that their non-belief is in fact a belief and a religion. You assume your god as a default position.
* I used your logic and arguments to support the FSM. You quickly jumped to rip into my arguments, and failed to see I was simply using your own logic against you. However, you rely on special pleading to claim that the rules don’t apply to your specific god.
* You make very big leaps from “this man existed” to “therefore he must be the son of god like he said!”. You then claim in absolutes that all historians agree with this. It’s dishonest. I’ve read some of the works you reference. (Interestingly enough, you try to appeal to atheists by citing atheist authors, though in the beginning you state it’s not possible to be an atheist)
* You assign intent to both writers and historical figures for which you can have no knowledge. You want it to be true, therefore it’s true. You speak in absolutes and claim it’s “unanimous.” That’s simply not true. You can’t possibly know the things you are making claims for.
* You claim there are no contradictions in your holy book. That’s false. It’s not just “contradiction of spelling”. There are very big contradictions throughout. And yes, when you keep it in context, those contradictions still exist. To claim it has no contradictions is lying.
I do apologize for not being specific when I was referring to science. However, I think that route would take us down a very different path. A path I think does very well to highlight the lack of “design” in the universe. I do not disagree that my statement was too general.
This is why a conversation can’t be had with you. The rules change and the goal posts move with every response. You don’t apply your same reasoning and logic to every other religion, and assume yours is correct.
I specifically asked the questions I did to get at the root of your beliefs. I’ve been on your side of the fence – I knew how you would respond. With your responses as they are, there can’t be a rational conversation.
nate —
Your advice to Diana — “I would not spend much more time on this topic.” — seems sound!
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Indeed.
WIMIB reminds me of Bertrand Russell’s “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
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WIMIB said “Meaningful discussion ended a while ago…“.
I almost agree with him. There never was meaningful discussion.
😀
Didn’t another William say something about being “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”?
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Thank you for your time, William.
can you cite me the works of Josephus and Tacitus including the quotes with citation of their works. Again, this is the standard for evidence applied to other historical figures.
Diana,
“[N]either human
effort nor the
emperor’s
generosity nor the
placating of the
gods ended the
scandalous belief
that the fire had
been ordered [by
Nero]. Therefore, to
put down the rumor,
Nero substituted as
culprits and
punished in the
most unusual ways
those hated for their
shameful acts …
whom the crowd
called “Chrestians.”
The founder of this
name, Christ
[ Christus in Latin],
had been executed
in the reign of
Tiberius by the
procurator Pontius
Pilate …
Suppressed for a
time, the deadly
superstition erupted
again not only in
Judea, the origin of
this evil, but also in
the city [Rome],
where all things
horrible and
shameful from
everywhere come
together and
become popular.” – Tacitus, Annals, 116-117AD, concerning fire of Rome 64AD.
“Being therefore this kind of person [i.e., a heartless
Sadducee], Ananus, thinking that he had a favorable
opportunity because Festus had died and Albinus was still
on his way, called a meeting [literally, “sanhedrin”] of
judges and brought into it the brother of Jesus-who-is-
called-Messiah … James by name, and some others. He
made the accusation that they had transgressed the law,
and he handed them over to be stoned.” – Josephus, The Jewish Antiquities.
There are also other references to Christ by Josephus.
You notice Tacitus is writing about 100 years after Christ., right? Therefore this is not an eyewitness account.