[This] is our movement. We will not consider you a part of it, we will not work with you, we will not befriend you. We will heretofore denounce you as the irrational or immoral scum you are (if such you are). If you reject these values, then you are no longer one of us. And we will now say so, publicly and repeatedly. You are hereby disowned.

See, this is what I’ve been trying to explain to you: the unique power of religion to make people hate one another. Without religion to generate this exclusionary hatred, this loathing of everyone who does not agree 100% with the views of Our Crowd, people would finally be able to live at peace with one another!

Oh wait.

(via ayjay)

This is so hilariously golden.

“It took 700 years from Constantine renaming Byzantium in his own honour to papal legates circulating letters of anathema that split the Roman and Orthodox churches. Atheism, in its public, online life, has started exchanging internet anathemas – perhaps we should call them inathemas – in little more than a decade.”

This is what always happens to rationalism. You begin with an absolute dedication to reason, and nothing but reason, and then find yourself as the night progresses doing a conga dance in the Festival of Unreason. And there is nothing more unsettling than the spectacle of our leading scientists throwing beads while flashing the laymen on the sidewalk.

Harris is blaming conservatives for doing simply what the space/time continuum is making them do. If you have a right view of the cosmos, Harris has been arguing, you won’t blame individuals for doing things that are completely outside their control, and then he proceeds immediately to the edifying task of blaming those who don’t think this way.

If atoms in motion are responsible for inner city crime, then atoms in motion are also responsible for the conservatives in red state, fly-over country who object to it. Not only so, for this is a liberating game, atoms in motion are also responsible for Harris objecting to the conservatives objecting to the crime. This would be great fun, but Harris keeps forgetting to apply his dogmas to his dogmas.

One understands why he keeps forgetting to do this, of course. If he remembered, he would realize there is no such thing as remembering. He would realize that sawing off the branch you are sitting on is an activity with consequences, by which I mean consequences that might affect sales.

I don’t fault Harris for arguing that, given his premises, we have no free will. I fault him for taking with his left hand what he has given with the right. I fault him for arguing against free will with an argument that presupposes it.

The central critique here is not that all atheists are ready to burst forth into unrestrained licentiousness, given the slightest provocation. Many atheists, atheism and all, don’t want to be raving criminals, and that is find with me. I am not saying Hitchens is a serial murderer, or that he ought to be. I am not saying that civilized atheists are just pretending to be ethical. I know that Hitchens expresses genuine moral outrage, and I am glad he does. It shows that he still is carrying the image of God […]

This critque is not aimed at his unrighteousness, but rather at his unsupported self-righteousness. The issue is not what Hitchens himself wants to do. The issue is whether he can get his god reason to rebuke a completely different atheist who was more of Stalin’s frame of mind. The issue is not that atheism requires an atheist to starve millions in the Soviet province of Georgia. It does not, and so Hitchens doesn’t have to. But it does necessitate that consistent atheists stand by mute, with nothing whatever to say, when others (theists and atheists alike) make choice that they personally would consider abominable and outrageous. This is because Stalin has no god, including Hitchens. The disapproval of Jehovah meant nothing to him, and the disapproval of Hitchens would have meant just as little. And Hitchens has no reason whatever that could possibly make Stalin see it differently. That is the issue. It is not whether Hitchens is Stalin. Of course he is not. The issue is whether Hitchens has anything whatever to say when Stalin is being Stalin. And he does not.

So whenever Hitchens condemns the moral behavior of anyone else, he is not proving that atheists can be moral too. He is proving, instead, that he is incapable of following his own premises out to the end of the road. He is proving that he is blissfully unaware of the blatant contradiction in his system where no one can impose his morality on another. But then Hitchens begins dispensing moral judgments on others, and he does so with a snow shovel. So this critique is directed at an intellectual failure of atheism, not at a moral failure. The subject is morality, but the failure is a failure in reason. This is unfortunate for them because it is a failure of their god.

Douglas Wilson in God Is: How Christianity Explains Everything (74-76) (italics in original, bold is mine)

Nailed it. Especially the last sentence.

The evidence for mankind creating our own gods through thousands of years is simply overwhelming, and there’s precisely zero evidence that our divine maker—should there turn out to be one, a concept I’m quite willing to consider, actually—is anything like us at all.

danielholter

Oh, I quite agree that man has sought to create his own gods for all of human history. But this doesn’t mean there is not a real one. If anything, your contention strengthens my point rather than weakens it. As C.S. Lewis famously argued, if I find a desire in myself that nothing in this material realm can satisfy, it must be because something immaterial exists that can fulfill it.

(Source: sds)

An argument is like a tool; you only put it down when the job is done. When atheists stop suspending their moral indignation from their invisible sky hook, then I will no longer amuse myself by pointing out their levitation trick.

The issues [of atheism] are important, but no sense getting really worked up over it. If we were all sitting in a used car lot, and one of the F-250 trucks began questioning the existence of Henry Ford, we would all think it was a serious situation, but that is not the same thing as thinking it a serious question.

Douglas Wilson in God Is: How Christianity Explains Everything

This is a very short work, making short work of Hitchens’ well-written but ultimately empty arguments. Wilson presents little new content, but his witty take down of Hitchens (et al) is great fun to read.

The very act of declaring yourself an ‘atheist,’ after all, suggests a particularly high level of interest in religious detail and debate — higher than many self-described Methodists or cradle Catholics who have a vague belief in God and show up at church on holidays, and also higher than the many nonbelievers who are merely indifferent to religion. Another way of putting it is that self-described atheists are the religious converts of the irreligious world. Like someone who leaps from Lutheranism to Catholicism, or Christianity to Islam, they’ve made an intellectual decision about their faith — or the lack thereof, that is. And so it isn’t surprising that they’d be more knowledgeable about the subject than the much larger populations of part-time churchgoers and ‘nothing in particular’ nonpractitioners alike.