(REPOST) Atheists Don't Own Reason

When an atheistic perspective is presented with a disdainful: "HOW COULD YOU THINK THAT?" attitude, I'm kind of floored. Didn't they see evidence of Christianity before we got to this point? I mean this can't be their first look at how the Christian Religion evolved over time. And that's what we get, we get looked at like we are people who are so stupid, that we have grasped on to this religion even after it has come and gone. Like a hippy in a Best Buy, looking for the drum circle. Christianity is not dead, and atheists cannot make it so by just saying so.

Even more interesting in the atheists utility belt is using counter culture and attempting to win the conversation by making it more cool for their side to exist than the other. Is this something they learned from Sid Meir's Civilizations? One problem with this is that we are in a conversation about religion. And, yes, America likes this idea of a godless man. We like bad-boys and doing things we are told not to do. It's part of our rebellious spirit. But, a wise man will see that rebellion will only get you so far. As much as we steer away from morality, or try to claim that everything is morale - there are ways that we ought to act, and there should be a morality in the world we live in.  

When discussing morality, many points that are made with an atheist will attack Christianity - the history, the plot points of wars and crusades, how women are treated differently in days of the past rather than now. What Atheists try to assume is that their belief system is the now - it is the updated version of what the past has taught us - it is the intellectual collection of everything we as humans have ever experienced in the past - and yet, it's none of this. It simply is a rejection of God. 

There is no morality in atheism, no call to arms, no set of pillars or truths, except - there is no God, and what we know, has defiantly produced enough information to say that this is a fact. This is a point i'm okay with them making, but it does so in this vicious, I can't believe you believe in that stuff kind of overzealousness that comes with the snobbery of an aristocrat. Sure other atheists like Nietzsche, will tell the atheist to arise from Nihilism, and find their own set of virtues - but this doesn't happen within the conversation with the atheist and the Christian. Their own virtues don't come out on the table. And if they do, they just say that they believe in what the world believes in - the popular, gay rights, women's rights whatever the hot topic is right now sort of belief system. It's this Smörgåsbord of "whatever rock and roll thinks."

This person will claim that they follow history, and science and technology. They will point out that they are for women and rights and society. And yet when you try and ask "what they believe in" there is this giant shadow. A dark spot in the conversation where their beliefs are not up for discussion - only those of the faith based believer. When you get down to the pillars of their own personal belief system, we have sound bites of what is "common knowledge" or the ability to reason within an open minded school of thought. What is "open-minded?" Does that mean that their beliefs don't have to be congruent?

I'm coming into a lot of conversations these days where conflict between my freedom of religion and the disdain of the atheist or people of science. {i love this idea that an atheist can usurp all truth by claiming to be on the side of science, as if science is just a guy in a lab somewhere with one mind on each subject and who's loyalty is constant}. We get into these conversations, and the one thing that atheists don't allow within the conversation is for God to have superpowers. They will say something like how did all the animals fit on the arc, or that the cheetah could not have survived in such circumstances. And I want to say something like: which circumstances? Have you been given all the variables. Have you considered the variable of the Awesome Power of God, the All Knowing and Omnipotent? That usually gets a chuckle, and then back to the scientific proof.

Science cannot prove everything. We don't even know at this point why we have to sleep. There are a lot of things that we just know, without knowing why we know them. I know we want to control the world. We want to be able to catalog it, and understand it, and make sense of it - but honestly, sometimes there are things we can't make sense of, entirely.

Since, patience is not usually a virtue they have in large quantity any argument is or discussion about religion is basically a back and forth where one person claims that the other is an idiot, or just blind to "science" as a whole and the other tries to use scripture to prove some sort of documentation that a non-faith based believer might actually resonate with. 

At this point it is a popularity contest. Remember, back in grammar school when you had "come-backs"? The kid who had the wittiest remark, or the "come-back" which made more fun of the other person was deemed cooler, or more clever.   

Lately, the atheists perspective involve using women and homosexuals as a sore spot to pressure the faith based believer into a position where he or she has to defend old world patriarchies while speaking on religion in a modern day setting. The world has changed, and so has the way that we look at the family. People are more independent, and utilize commerce and industry in a vastly different way than people did when they were in a feudal system. Also, there is a lot that we can argue about, because at some point the power play for people's obedience involved usurping Christianity for use as a method of control, and instigating a theocracy.

There needs to be a HUGE distinction between what Jesus Christ taught, and was about anything that is contrary. This is my line in the sand. When we start discussing people who "claim to be Christian" or are doing something in the name of Christianity - we have to ask ourselves - is this inline with Jesus' teachings. If it is not, we need to be able to state that it is not Christian, or of God, but of man.

I wish that the conversation would dial back a little bit from the explosive name calling and stepping on each other's sacred subjects, and move towards a conversation where we can respectfully discuss one another's belief systems in a calm and inquisitive manner. 

Atheists don’t own reason  By Tom Gilson

The new atheists--participants in the contemporary anti-religion movement led by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, the late Christopher Hitchens, among others--are working overtime to tell the world that reason favors atheism, and atheism alone. Richard Dawkins leads hisFoundation for Reason and Science. Sam Harris is founder and chair ofProject Reason. The upcoming March 24 Reason Rally in Washington, D.C. is the new atheists’ latest and most visible attempt to send the message that reason belongs to the atheists.

For years, though, knowledgeable critics have been calling attention to new atheist’ rational fallacies, emotionally loaded rhetoric, and illegitimate, selective use of evidence. It’s time now to add that up together and recognize what it means: the new atheists have no business proclaiming themselves the defenders of reason, simply because they don’t practice it competently.“Far from being the defenders of reason, atheists are among the chief offenders against it,” writes Tom Gilson. (Nikki Kahn - THE WASHINGTON POST)Of course that’s not what the new atheists want us to believe. It is religion, they say, that is the antithesis of reason. Sam Harris assures us in “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” (p. 55) that “faith is what reason becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse-constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor.

”What happens, though, when we examine the new atheists’ own “reasonableness” and “internal coherence”?

Sam Harris debated William Lane Craig last April on whether atheism or theism (roughly defined as the belief in one God) provides a better explanation for the existence of moral truths (transcript here).

Opinions may differ as to which of them held the more defensible position. What can hardly be disputed, though, is that Craig showed up with logical arguments, at least one of which, if sound, would completely destroy Harris’s atheistic explanation for morality. Harris conspicuously ignored this, and indeed virtually all of Craig’s logic. He devoted one 12-minute segment to rhetoric depicting Christianity in the most negative light possible, and suggesting that we should therefore conclude that Christianity is wrong. It was what logicians would describe as a fallacious appeal to emotion with respect to the question being debated and to the points Craig had raised.

In his best-selling “The God Delusion,” Richard Dawkins devotes an entire chapter to unscientific anecdotes supporting his belief that a religious upbringing is abusive to children. (See also “Religion’s Real Child Abuse.”) Actual science shows exactly the opposite: spiritually engaged teens are healthier than others on multiple dimensions. Such abandonment of science is surprisingly irrational for the man who was formerly Oxford University’s Professor for the Public Understanding of Science.

But rational and logical errors are pervasive throughout “The God Delusion,” so much so that University of Florida philosopher Michael Ruse, an atheist, would endorse Alister and Joanna Collicutt McGrath’s“The Dawkins Delusion?” by saying, “‘The God Delusion’ makes me embarrassed to be an atheist, and the McGraths show why.”

These are, unfortunately, not isolated examples. The American Atheists, for example, co-sponsored a billboard in Harrisburg, PAjuxtaposing half of a sentence from the Bible with an inflammatory, racially charged image of slavery. In doing so they combined at least two rational errors: the fallacious appeal to emotion and imagery, and the “straw man” fallacy of misrepresenting their opponents’ position; for although the quoted phrase, “Slaves, obey your masters,” is troubling on the surface, the Bible’s supposed endorsement of slavery is not what atheists allege it to be.

As Glenn Sunshine shows in his chapter in “True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism,” Christianity has in fact been history’s major force for the freeing of slaves. Immediate abolition was realistically impossible in New Testament times: The Romans would have treated it as insurrection, and the inevitable bloodshed to follow it would have produced greater evil than would have been alleviated by abolition. The injunction to “obey” was thus temporary and contextual. It was also tempered with instructions to masters to treat slaves reasonably, as fellow human beings. Eventually slavery “virtually disappeared” from Europe under Christianity’s influence, as social historian Rodney Stark stated in “For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery” (p. 299).

Failures in the practice of rational reasoning such as these are all too common among the New Atheists. They charge Christianity with being unreasoning or unreasonable, but too often they do so as they have done with slavery: use incomplete evidence or demonstrably invalid reasoning.

From my observations, it adds up to this: the new atheists’ difficulty with valid, responsible reasoning is widespread and systemic. Far from being the defenders of reason, they are among the chief offenders against it. It’s time we called them on that.
Tom Gilson is a writer and missions strategist blogging atwww.thinkingchristian.net, and the managing editor of the collaborative e-book “True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism.”