Here’s hoping that the defensive folks don’t cross the line into “nuh-uh-ing” the Hernandez family, or trying to minimize their very real feelings by saying that they came from “just” the internet.  Please, don’t go there.

The whole issue of religion and suicide always seemed absurd to me in the couple different religions I’ve practiced. Now I’m not religious, but when I was, towards religious moral teaching I took an attitude of if it feels good, I’m okay with it; if it feels wrong, I ignore it. I think some people like me who might consider themselves members of one faith or another might not really care or pay attention to what their faith teaches. Instead, they believe whatever they want to and to the extent that their beliefs sync up with those of their faith, great. To the extent that they don’t, these people are not troubled. It’s very difficult to break the cultural and social affinities people have with religion. I agree that religion is a net negative force, but sometimes ignoring the religion’s odious teachings from within can be an effective way to be a better person without causing the strain and broken relationships caused by leaving a religion.

Theological wankery is all fun and games when it’s abstract bullshitting, but when it comes to people’s real life experiences, it can create unnecessary trauma.

Absofuckinglutely.  In addition, it feeds self-centered, self-aggrandizing attitudes.

I’ll never forget this one atheist-created “demotivational” poster about religion I saw that still haunts me. 

One side was a picture looking out a plane window, the other side a picture of an African girl .

The window said said (paraphrasing) God answers Jennifer’s prayers to make her flight, but turns a blind eye to the girl sold into prostitution. 

Religion can only be said to offer comfort if you’re willing to completely and totally ignore the plain and simple fact that, while you’re being “comforted” or “blessed” by your god, he’s torturing billions upon billions of other people.

That anyone could look at that picture and think “oh he’s going to hell”, means that they are also thinking that they would chose the totally righteous path of burning to death, or asphixating, and are therefore superior, more holy and totally going to get their eternal beach party with Diety X. 

Religion is narcissism, couched in “aren’t I such a good person”. 

fwiw here, I think that the religious stuff was more about people using doctrine to comfort themselves by hurting others—faced with an unsupportable burden, lots of people respond by lashing out. But that just reinforces Amanda’s point: if a lie is going to be psychologically useful, it shouldn’t be really conducive to being used for one group of people to beat up on others.

There’s also this article, which is entirely about how people don’t like to acknowledge the fact that anyone jumped from the WTC.  Being an atheist, I was confused at first about why people would have such a problem acknowledging this.  I seriously didn’t understand, until I read the part about hell.  It’s bizarre to me that a religious belief that someone who commits suicide will go to hell trumps simple common sense.  It’s not at all hard to understand why someone would have jumped, and it has nothing to do with sin.

That being said, I can understand why the medical examiner quoted in the article is troubled by the thought of listing “suicide” as the manner of death, because that does seem inaccurate, even though in a literal sense it’s true.  (Of course, there were quite possibly people who simply fell out of the building, and I don’t know how you could distinguish between someone who jumped and someone who fell.)

This is, unfortunately, every bad parody of earnest liberalism.

Your problem is that you don’t like standards and don’t like stigmas. For very good reasons, we stigmatize suicide. In a lot of cases, it’s a terrible thing to do. Now, naturally, even when jumpers off the WTC make a rather rational decision to jump, we are instinctually going to be repulsed by this until reason takes over—which, no surprise, actual religions manage to figure out—the religions you’re complaining about actually agree with the post secret writer! The “earnest liberal” solution is, “we shouldn’t stigmatize suicide because there are corner cases where it is okay because someone might not deal with the situation rationally when confronted with someone who jumps!”

What youre unhappy with is a standard—a standard that doesn’t accoutrements for complexity and all situations, but an existing standard. And it’s a standard that causes an initial feeling of discomfort when dealing with jumpers. Apparently churches are competent enough to reason through it while maintaining a stigma against suicide, but it’s something that you have a problem reconciling.

You’re actually arguing we stigmatize mental health for good reasons?  Whatever.  I strongly disagree that pissing on the graves of people who commit suicide is instinctual.  You have no real proof of that, Tyro.  Many of us, when faced with people who struggle with suicide, feel compassion and not the urge to stigmatize.  If that makes me an “earnest” liberal, okay.  I’d rather that than a a person who treats suicidal people like shit instead of human beings who are suffering.

Also, threatening ordinary suicidal people with hell isn’t really as rational as you’re pretending it is.  It’s just mean and controlling.  You make it seem like ordinary suicides are people who are like, “La di dah, I think it would be SO FUN to blow my head off.”  In reality, they are often in a hell of their own.  Your utter lack of compassion—-and defensiveness towards religion’s utter lack of compassion—-for people suffering severe depression is pretty gross, yeah.  If that makes me “earnest”, so be it.  It’s honestly hard for me to be ironic about the suffering of suicidal people and those who love them.

Rare, I’ll add that there’s another layer of narcissism with the “buy MY religion is the moral one”. Acting superior to others because they inherited, by accident really, a different set of myths than yours is really strange to me.

@Amanda #8: very interesting, and accurate, I think.  We should not be quick to draw a distinction between the 9/11 jumpers and others who commit suicide, just because the people in the towers on 9/11 were in a situation where we all accept that despair of any relief from their pain was warranted.

Most people who commit suicide are probably in such a situation; otherwise they wouldn’t do it.  People say that suicide is a “selfish act” because of the pain it causes friends and family, but this presumes that the pain a severely suicidal person is going through is something they can get under control.  Maybe sometimes they can, with counseling or medication, but when they can’t, we may have to accept that they have no choice.  Not that it makes it any better for those of us who lose our loved ones to suicide.

And who gives a damn about suicide? It’s just an example of religion making people suffer more than already would. The belief that suicides go to hell is just an extra kick in the teeth to the friends and family of a suicide. There are a lot of other examples of religion torturing people for no reason. Gays, lesbians, people who masturbate, pretty much anyone.

I totally agree with Amanda, it’s the other side of the coin that religious people always want to bring up, that they’re giving people comfort.

“It’s okay, there probably isn’t a God” is the comfort that atheism can offer. There probably isn’t a supernatural being who might fuck with you to test your faith, or sentence you to everlasting torment because you had sex with someone of the same gender. The gods posited by most religions are something that people need protection from.

Can anyone tell I was raised Catholic? I’m sure the Jews/Unitarians etc. are nicer and I’m glad they are. I know there are good people in every religion, but anyone who believes in hell perpetuating a cruel faith. Even if my loved one was a monster, why force me to think of them in everlasting torment?

I think that there is ample evidence that religion does in fact provide some degree of solace and comfort to believers (something even Marx, no friend of religion, understood and which was the basis for his “religion is the opiate of the masses” comment).  At the same time, you are absolutely right about it creating a whole different set of anxieties and conflicts (something else Marx saw as inevitable).  Expecting consistency in religion (or really any other major social institution) is doomed to disappoint.  Such contradictions are the norm and not the exception.

Theological wankery aside, the weirdest question here is, since when is jumping out of a burning building even considered suicide? to me, this is as logical a survival strategy as burning alive. the idea that this was suicide is just…bizarre.

There was an episode of This American Life a while back that featured a story about a guy who was friends with a man with severe depression. After this friend tried suicide, the storyteller interviewed him. The depressed friend said people always says that suicide is selfish, but he thought it was selfish for his family and friends to want him to keep living in his state of constant misery.

The standards that churches hold are standards that hurt people for no good reason and rely on dogma or made-up shit to justify those standards. I will happily remain church standard free.

I think Tyro learned all he knows about Suicide from watching Heathers.

Suicide needs to be fucking taken off the table with religion. We don’t need to stigmatize it because it will never be an option for a person with a healthy brain. It takes a serious chemical imbalance in the human brain to override the survival instinct (which is a hella lot stronger than religious conviction). You can have a really shitty day, and feel like poop, and want, consciously, to end it all, but unless you’ve got the right chemical cocktail going in your brain, you can stand on that bridge for an hour and a half willing your feet to jump and you’re not going to be able to move.

We need to treat suicide like we would treat death by any other disease.

This piece somewhat distorts the facts of the Esquire article as they relate to the Hernandez family’s beliefs.  The key passage is as follows:

[H]is family knows, because he wouldn’t have jumped out a window: not Papi. “He was trying to come home,” Catherine says one morning, in a living room primarily decorated with framed photographs of her father. “He was trying to come home to us, and he knew he wasn’t going to make it by jumping out a window.” . . . The Norberto Hernandez Eulogia knew would not have been deterred by smoke or by fire in his effort to come home to her. The Norberto Hernandez she knew would have endured any pain before he jumped out of a window.

The family was basically saying he loved them so much he would have made more of an effort to get out, that he was stronger and braver than to just give up.  Yes, it’s pretty obvious that under the circumstances the jumper had no choice, and that in any event the choice to jump required as much bravery as the choice to run through fire.  But the emotions the family members are expressing really have little to do with religion.  However irrational their perception of the situation their father faced was, they were just trying to say he was not a coward.  It’s similar to people commenting about someone’s “brave battle with cancer” and noting that “she never gave up.”  It’s obsessive in a Westboro Baptist Church way to dissect the every word of grieving people, especially when their comments are provoked in a spontaneous way by a journalist confronting them with what he says is a picture of their loved one’s last horrible moments. 

If we are considering issues of morality, I think we really should also take a look at the ethics of the reporter disturbing this grieving family.  In the opening passages, we are informed that in 1968 the photographer was also jumping up and down to take pictures of Bobby Kennedy with a bullet in his head, despite the begging of Kennedy’s wife not to do it.  Somehow this is held up as an example of journalistic integrity, and there’s a suggestion that there is some kind of mystical sacred relationship between the Kennedy photographs and the jumper photographs. That concept is used to justify the exploration of the jumper’s family’s theology, and expose them to ridicule to the world.  I’m wondering if the Ethel Kennedy was as seriously grilled about what she really thought about the efficacy of the last rites administered to her husband.

For very good reasons, we stigmatize suicide

What good reasons are there to stigmatize the family of a suicide, Tyro?

Don’t deny it happens, because it does everyday.

“People say that suicide is a “selfish act” because of the pain it causes friends and family, but this presumes that the pain a severely suicidal person is going through is something they can get under control.”

Moreover, it’s just dumb and selfish to expect people to carry out their lives ONLY in accordance with what would cause the least discomfort to people around them. It’s the human prerogative to balance individual needs with what benefits the community, not privilege one over the other (libertarianism or draining thankless altruism). Every action anybody takes causes collateral damage to someone else, even those carried out with an effort to minimize suffering. Suicidal people can’t control other people’s feelings any more than they can control their own suffering, unless they make some sort of weird concerted effort to become estranged from everyone they know before they kill themselves.

Besides, not doing something because “it will hurt other people’s feelings” can extend to all sorts of otherwise harmless behaviours, like sex reassignment, coming out of the closet, etc., which I’m sure Tyro wouldn’t extend his argument to. In the end suicide is a personal choice, and while its natural to feel grief about the choice of a loved one, it’s hardly worthy of being seen as a sin on par with those that disrupt or destroy the lives of others.

I did think something along the lines of what Tyro said, but with more thought towards what benefited the suicidal: a stigma against suicide might help in the long term if it’s the only thing encouraging mentally ill people to seek treatment and support rather than death. But there are ways of helping these people that don’t require fairy stories that end up causing more harm than good.

I’m trying to imagine the original society that had to write the “Suicide sends you to hell” religious edict.  Was their society so terribly mismanaged and miserable that large numbers of people were willingly ending their own lives just to escape it?  Was the church so concerned with establishing a strangling control over its faithful that it decided “Let’s stigmatize the dead and scare our followers so completely that even dying isn’t considered a form of escape from our control”?

What kind of horrible society would feel the need to stigmatize suicide when it already has so many negative consequences?

#15:

We need to treat suicide like we would treat death by any other disease.

Well, and that’s just the thing.  Not all diseases are treated the same.  Do we quarantine the suicidal?  Do we just feed them medication until they “get better”?  Do we just throw professionals at the ill individual until someone can fix their problems?  Or do we concede that the disease is terminal and simply offer them end-of-life counseling?

I mean, a suicidal 70-year-old with metastized lung cancer and a suicidal teen who just broke up with his girlfriend are two very different people with two very different conditions.  :-p

If we treat general human conditions - physical sickness, poverty, mental illness, homelessness, etc - I think the symptom of suicide will fade as a threat.  Religion and secularism alike are only useful when they address these fundamental conditions.  All that talk of “comfort” versus “conflict” is meaningless unless you can tell me what real issues your proposed solution resolves.  If finding Jesus makes the depressed teen want to live again, I suppose it’s a viable treatment.  But an advanced form of chemo is probably going to be more useful for the 70-year-old woman.

And as for the guy jumping out of the tower?  He really just wanted a flight of stairs to walk down.  Maybe we try to do a little more improving-the-building-code and a little less blaming-the-victim.

Religion can certainly provide solace to an individual, as long as the individual doesn’t think too hard about it.  That’s the whole point - bad things may happen to you and your clan, but things will work out for your afterlife or whatever.  That’s plenty comforting, provided you have no compassion for those outside your clan who suffer because “God allowed them to for some reason” or “they deserve to suffer because they’re outside the clan.”  It doesn’t necessarily make you a wholly bad person to take solace in religion either, if you simply haven’t considered the implications yet.

#6:  People don’t abstain from suicide because it’s “stigmatized”, they refrain from suicide because they don’t want to die.  Religious conservatives who stigmatize those who have become desperate to the point of suicide are motivated by contempt and coerciveness, and not by any genuine desire to help people who are thinking of suicide.

For very good reasons, we stigmatize suicide.

I’d like you to list even one of those reasons. Mostly because I want to watch the Pandagoniat eviscerate it.

Another comfort that I take from atheism is that, when children starve to death or die in bombings or otherwise suffer horribly, it is not personal.  When bad things happen to me it is not personal.  When they happen to people whom I love it is not personal.  There is no overriding power that can stop bad things from happening, but that isn’t a bad thing to me because it also means that there wasn’t some force out there twiddling its thumbs while the Holocaust happened.  The possibility of a deity with any control whatsoever over the universe is far, far more horrifying than the alternative.  Sure, it means that terrible things happen, but it also means that a) you can blame that shit on human beings and nature and b) that means that human beings have some power to stop things from happening themselves.  It gives both impetus and relief from theodicy.  I’m far more horrified by the idea of a deity watching children die in warfare than I am by the idea of children dying in warfare in a universe that is guided by the impersonal and nonsentient laws of physics.

Frankly, I think you’re being too harsh on the people who really just wanted to know who was making the claim that people who jumped from the towers were going to hell.  Speaking for myself, I literally had never heard that claim before, and I wanted to know who was saying it, and whether anyone in a position of religious authority was advancing it, because it really surprised me.  I don’t dispute that the Hernandez family and apparently others felt that way, but I hadn’t heard of them or read that one story.  To disparage legitimate requests for information as defensive “nuh-uh” is unfair.  If you’re claiming that something is actually happening, it’s fair for people to request evidence that it is happening, and to ask for information about the scope of the phenomenon you’re describing. 

And the response that “religion” says that people who commit suicide are going to hell is not an answer.  I just disagree that these deaths were suicides in the way we generally use the word.  The people who jumped were faced with imminent and inevitable death if they stayed.  It’s just not possible to say that any one of them was choosing to die rather than live.  The NY coroner was absolutely right to list the cause of death as “homicide” for each and every one of them, and not just because there is no way to know who jumped intentionally and who fell or was blown out.  And I don’t think that’s a trivial, moving-the-goalposts point.  I think these deaths were so far from what we think of as suicide that it’s not really the right word to describe them.

This is not to say that it’s fine to say that other people who committed suicide are going to hell, because I don’t think either that it’s true or that it’s fine to promote that idea.  Just to be clear. 

One other point: I noticed in yesterday’s comment section a commenter named “atheist” insisted that the Catholic Catechism allegedly doomed to hell those who “commit suicide” by jumping of buildings rather than waiting to be incinerated by flames.  The link provided did not provide the least bit of support to that proposition, other than containing a general prohibition against suicide.  In fact, in discussing suicide by “omission”, it stated that it would be suicide to remain in a burning house.  However, nothing in the cited passage discussed the preferred choice when both options lead to death. 

So this belief by “atheist” was false and irrational.  It wouldn’t be fair to attribute that same level of irrationality to all atheists, or to atheism, simply because of that one commenter’s misinformed utterance.  But that seems to be what is being done with the Hernandez’ family’s (misinterpreted) utterances; they are now representatives of Catholic or some related doctrine.

Assuming they are representatives of any beliefs, they are representatives of their own beliefs.  They are autonomous humans beings.  They may be stupid people, mean-spirited people, angry people, mentally ill people, but they speak for no one but themselves.

Also, I would like to add that I’m sincerely floored by the sheer inhumanity of Tyro’s take on suicide.  Way to make people who already think that they are a waste of space think that they are even more of one because they are selfish enough to want to end it all.  Depressed people already have to deal with the crippling nature of depression, and it is worse when they feel required to be normal and feel like they are failing in their efforts to just not be depressed anymore.  If they’re considering suicide then they’re already incredibly low and feeling as if they are a selfish piece of shit, and telling them that they are pretty much right about themselves is the worst possible thing to do.  Fuck yourself.  They’re usually already thinking of the burden that they perceive themselves to be on other people when they attempt or succeed at killing themselves.

Sigh. The suicide thing. Eight years ago this month, my younger brother, who had been fighting a very tough battle with depression died in a single-car drunk driving accident. Was it suicide? I’ll never really know, but my instinct, as the person who probably knew him best in this world, was that it was an impulsive suicidal act.
And yet, in order to get him buried in the Catholic Church for my mother, I just shut up about that. I think the official church line is that suicide is tragic, but I was already having to face dealing with a bunch of priests in my hour of horror, so I didn’t go there. (And yes, if anything convinced me to leave the church it was my mother’s priest’s ridiculous homily. Fuck all of you all as my sweetie would say).
But its interesting. When I mention to people who knew him that I think he killed himself, they get really upset and argue against it. No, he didn’t shoot himself in the head. No it wasn’t premeditated. But it’s pretty hard to argue against driving off a backroad embankment “at a high rate of speed” as the coroner told me.
He was terribly depressed. He was fighting minute by minute. I miss him with all my heart, but I would not wish for him to be in that kind of pain again.
As for hell—whatever. I think all that’s a fairy tale—if there is a G-d, I hope it’s the light and mercy that my childhood nuns told me it was ...

Well, and that’s just the thing.  Not all diseases are treated the same.  Do we quarantine the suicidal?  Do we just feed them medication until they “get better”?  Do we just throw professionals at the ill individual until someone can fix their problems?  Or do we concede that the disease is terminal and simply offer them end-of-life counseling?

Uh, I think you’re missing the point. When I said “We need to treat suicide like we would treat death by any other disease.” I meant exactly that: Suicide. If you want to lock up someone who has *already committed suicide* you’re free to do so but you might get into trouble about mistreatment of a corpse.

But in case you’re referring to something like severe depression or a failed attempt, I really firmly believe that the 70-year-old woman has every right to refuse treatment: for cancer, for depression, etc. If someone has heart disease, we don’t LOCK THEM UP to prevent them from eating mozzarella sticks. I think that friends and family have every right to exert the “please don’t, we love you very much, please go into treatment so we can keep you around.” But the person has the right to veto that decision and that’s too bad so sad but there it is… because I have a fundamental belief that “you can’t save someone against their will” and that applies across-the-board.

“Theological wankery aside, the weirdest question here is, since when is jumping out of a burning building even considered suicide?”

Yeah, I don’t really get that, either.  I mean, we’ve pretty much all heard stories about people surviving whatever usually extremely fatal thing (here, falls from extreme heights).  It seems unknowable if any individual person trying to escape the certain death of a burning highrise was hoping they might be that person, as opposed to just hoping for a less-painful end.  And, of course, it’s an ultimately pointless question—how is leaping from a burning building (or a vehicle going over a cliff, or a sinking ship) any more suicide than staying put, knowing that you’ll be killed by the disaster?  How is the person driven out a window by flames dead of fire or misadventure if it’s the second story and suicide if it’s the tenth?  Wtf?

Though for sure religious convictions about suicide affect people.  It’s come up at least a few times I’ve seen on Dr. G: Medical Examiner, and I’m not an overly-enthusiastic viewer.  The Catholic families where it might have been suicide will latch onto pretty much any alternate explanation, even if it’s just conjecture on Garavaglia’s part (eg, the deceased was confused and still in pain, they took a small overdose inadvertently vs. the deceased was still in pain and feeling terribly ill, they took a small overdose hoping to avoid a prolonged death by disease).  It’s sick that they have to go through that on top of the loss of a loved one.

To disparage legitimate requests for information as defensive “nuh-uh” is unfair.  If you’re claiming that something is actually happening, it’s fair for people to request evidence that it is happening, and to ask for information about the scope of the phenomenon you’re describing.

This is an especially important point given that, as I pointed out above, once Amanda did provide the link to the Esquire story it demonstrated that the Hernandez’ family’s beliefs were not quite what she represented them to be.

Zifnab:  In the early church, there was a problem with people killing themselves to go to heaven and join with Jesus/God when he didn’t return in the first hundred years or so.

I think that the medical examiners didn’t want to use suicide as a cause of death because then someone who had a life insurance policy might have had the survivors denied a claim. Most insurance policies do not pay benefits after a suicide.

Wondering about the origin of religious edicts against suicide, maybe part of it is that killing yourself is the ultimate statement of shoving your deity’s earthly creation back in its face. Reject the precious gift of life? Go to hell.

But then, the opposite logic also makes sense: after earth, there is the afterlife, this wonderful place where you are even closer to your deity than when you were on earth, so people who take steps to get there sooner should be rewarded, right?

Or maybe that’s the rub: if religions are pushing this idea that there’s a glorious afterlife that can only be attained after you die, there has to be some kind of mechanism in place to keep entire religions from becoming suicide cults. Because if all its followers go away, the religion stops existing, and for some reason that’s a bad thing (maybe it has something to do with sticking around to convert new souls throughout the future or something).

Most insurance policies do not pay benefits after a suicide.

It’s only a one to two year period where a suicide nullifies the policy depending on the state it was contracted in,  if the policy is older than 1 or 2 years then they have to pay even if it is suicide.

My ex-husband is severely depressed and refuses any treatment for it. He will likely never choose an active form of suicide, but the way he lives his life is something I’ve come to see as his passive pursuit of suicide - especially his driving habits. He is a reckless driver who has wrecked at least 6 cars and twice almost died in a car accident. Doesn’t wear his seatbelt, swerves from lane to lane, drives way above the speed limit at all times.

I am not going to talk about the 9/11 jumpers. They are simply too easy for apologists to dismiss as “not a suicide.” Even if the jumpers are not suicides stigmatization of suicide is one of the most awful things religion in America does. Even if the jumpers are suicides, any religion would most likely give them a pass due to the circumstances around their death.

Yet they will not give suicides a pass in the case of euthanasia. Worse than the jumpers, people outside of the faith are tormented as well.

We were forced to watch my mother die of terminal cancer in her brain for five months. These were not five “Thank god we had her for that long” months. These were five months where she was in constant pain and misery and she was gradually not the person we knew anymore and eventually basically not even a person. She would have gone with medically assisted suicide if it were legal where we live or even would have killed herself towards the end had she been physically capable. This experience was incredibly traumatic for me and my father. Adding to the trauma was that there was no space in hospices around us for her.

That the hospices were full tells me that a lot of people die in this way. There is no reason that my mother should have died this way but the state buys into the idea that “only god chooses when you die.”

maurinsky, you’ve actually hit on the thing that really DOES give you a right to lock up someone and force them into treatment: because a person who drives like that is endangering others. If this guy wants to die, that’s his business. But he doesn’t have the right to cause a car accident that could potentially hurt or kill someone else as his preferred method of death. This is when I will categorically swear up and down the the person is doing something selfish. And I think that in the same way, if a person commits suicide in such a way that someone will “find them unawares” (ie, come home from school and find your dad hanging from the ceiling), that’s fucking selfish and that does harm to others.

TO maurinsky on #34:
Can’t something be done about him? His life is his to take, but I care about him killing people, who *do* want to live, or leaving them invalids for life, paralyzed for example. I wouldn’t call a suicide selfish, if the person kills only himself, but behaving like this *is* horribly selfish. Can’t he be told this directly? His driving license taken? At least, you can do the first. How would you and his relatives feel after he kills a family? A child? Any person?

“We need to treat suicide like we would treat death by any other disease.”

Sort of.  I suggest reading, if you haven’t already, Kay Redfield Jameson’s excellent “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide.”  Suicide is often the result of un- or under-treated mental illness, especially depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia, although most people with mental illness don’t kill themselves.  It’s also true that suicide contagion is a real phenomenon.  But suicide is not just like death from cancer or a car accident, because the person committing suicide takes an affirmative act in order to die, and that element of choice makes suicide unique and the prevention of it more complicated.  It’s also what often makes the aftermath of suicide so difficult for the survivors.

Kit-Kat—like how? How should we treat death by suicide? Should we piss on the grave? Should we guilt trip the family because there was MORE THEY COULD HAVE DONE to prevent it? How should we treat suicide if not like “wow, that’s so terrible, we’re so sorry that this happened to you and that this illness took your loved one from you.”

Actually (I think the 9/11 jumpers would be an exception to this), but suicide is shown to be “contagious” and there are guidelines to minimize the risk of contagion by not talking about the death to much, not showing romantic aspects of death like funerals etc. A few weeks ago was suicide prevention day, and npr had stories all day about how victims of suicide cannot be celebrated in the way that other victims of fatalities are because it causes immitators.

“News coverage is less likely to contribute to suicide contagion when reports of community expressions of grief (e.g., public eulogies, flying flags at half-mast, and erecting permanent public memorials) are minimized. Such actions may contribute to suicide contagion by suggesting to susceptible persons that society is honoring the suicidal behavior of the deceased person, rather than mourning the person’s death.”

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00031539.htm

Obviously there is a difference between this and mercy suicides and 9/11 jumpers, but suicide is partially stygmatized for good reason and it is really hard to get a nuanced message like that out.

What youre unhappy with is a standard—a standard that doesn’t accoutrements for complexity and all situations, but an existing standard. And it’s a standard that causes an initial feeling of discomfort when dealing with jumpers. Apparently churches are competent enough to reason through it while maintaining a stigma against suicide, but it’s something that you have a problem reconciling.
Comment #6: Tyro on 09/13 at 10:11 AM

Hahaha. Better look up the definition of “accoutrements.”

I don’t know the current position of the Catholic Church on this, but for many years their members were told that if they died without receiving the last rites, they were not in a state of grace and would be going to hell.  This is anyone who died of anything, mind you.

When John Kennedy was killed, his widow was absolutely distraught that, since he had been shot in the head and was essentially dead by the time he reached the hospital, he hadn’t been able to really receive and respond to the sacrament of last rites.    The priest who had given the last rites spent a lot of time reassuring her that her husband wasn’t going to hell because of that.  Though I no longer recall exactly what he said to her, (it’s been a few years, of course),  IIRC he told her something about how there was still a flicker of life in John Kennedy when the priest gave him the rites. 

Religion as comfort, indeed.  People create their own myths around dead loved ones, that was quite clear in the Junod article and I’m sure all of us have done it ourselves and/or know people who have.  We don’t need any sky pilots to help us with this.

but suicide is partially stygmatized for good reason

Again, how does that help the survivors?

I think being honest about the impact suicide has on a family is worth talking about:

A participant lies in a coffin during a mock funeral in Seoul. Such death simulation courses aim to underscore to participants the value of life and hopefully discourage suicides.

I don’t think the usual suspect of chemical imbalance can be blamed for the South Korean epidemic:

South Korean officials have announced that they are taking increased steps to combat a worsening public ill: suicide.

In this high-pressure East Asian nation, residents are taking their lives at a rate that is three times higher than two decades ago. The rise has given South Korea the highest suicide rate among the 34 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The nation’s rate of self-inflicted deaths is sizably higher than those of other nations in the organization, according to 2009 statistics, the most recent available. In South Korea, 15,413 took their lives that year, or 28.4 for every 100,000 residents. That was higher than Japan’s 19.4 and twice the average rate of other OECD nations.

To make matters worse, experts here estimate that the suicides represent only 10% of the attempts South Koreans make to kill themselves.

With World Suicide Prevention Day on Saturday, South Korea’s Ministry of Health and Welfare has vowed to change that. Federal lawmakers this year passed a bill that will make funding available for more suicide prevention centers nationwide. The law also calls for officials to revisit the issue within five years.

“With this law we hope that the number of suicide deaths will go down in the near future,” said Wi Hwan, an official at the Ministry of Health.

Officials plan to install surveillance cameras and emergency phones at the bridges along Seoul’s Han River, the site of many suicides. Last year, 108 people took their lives by jumping from one of the more than two dozen bridges that span the river.

In South Korea, a pressure-filled society where good grades and admission to the best schools are demanded of most students, suicide ranks as the second-leading cause of death among teenagers.

Rare, I’ll add that there’s another layer of narcissism with the “buy MY religion is the moral one”. Acting superior to others because they inherited, by accident really, a different set of myths than yours is really strange to me.

Exactly and I wonder if this accidental inheritance aspect of religion for a large percentage of theists is why they are so excessively emotionally attached to their accidentally inherited religion.  When criticizing their religion, its criticizing their families?

++
#23 - I agree 100%.  Atheism, imo, offers *real* comfort, not cold comfort.  Shit happens to everyone - you weren’t fated to suffer by some callous deity, you didn’t do something to piss this callous deity off so now he’s punishing you.  You don’t owe a callous deity anything. 

It’s infinitely more freeing, more uplifting, more profound to accept the fact that humans can really, really suck, but they can also stop sucking and neither of those options are dependant upon the whims of some callous deity.  The human race needs to own our shit and stop waiting to be rescued before we frigging destroy ourselves.
++

Assuming they are representatives of any beliefs, they are representatives of their own beliefs. They are autonomous humans beings. They may be stupid people, mean-spirited people, angry people, mentally ill people, but they speak for no one but themselves.

Yes, but do you know any REAL Scotsman?

Anniecat45, a similar process took place when <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_White”>Dan White<a>, the “twinkie defense” murderer killed himself, his family was allowed to have a Catholic Mass for his death, despite the historic ban on suicides receiving such treatment, on the grounds that he was ‘mentally ill’.

Presumably, his acting like a murderous thug was no problem, because he undoubtedly received a penance and absolution for his acts before he died.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_White

Catechism of the Catholic Church

Euthanasia

2276 Those whose lives are diminished or weakened deserve special respect. Sick or handicapped persons should be helped to lead lives as normal as possible.

2277 Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacceptable.

Thus an act or omission which, of itself or by intention, causes death in order to eliminate suffering constitutes a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator. The error of judgment into which one can fall in good faith does not change the nature of this murderous act, which must always be forbidden and excluded.

2278 Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of “over-zealous” treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted. The decisions should be made by the patient if he is competent and able or, if not, by those legally entitled to act for the patient, whose reasonable will and legitimate interests must always be respected.

2279 Even if death is thought imminent, the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted. The use of painkillers to alleviate the sufferings of the dying, even at the risk of shortening their days, can be morally in conformity with human dignity if death is not willed as either an end or a means, but only foreseen and tolerated as inevitable. Palliative care is a special form of disinterested charity. As such it should be encouraged.

Suicide

2280 Everyone is responsible for his life before God who has given it to him. It is God who remains the sovereign Master of life. We are obliged to accept life gratefully and preserve it for his honor and the salvation of our souls. We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.

2281 Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations.
Suicide is contrary to love for the living God.

2282 If suicide is committed with the intention of setting an example, especially to the young, it also takes on the gravity of scandal. Voluntary co-operation in suicide is contrary to the moral law. Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.

2283 We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. the Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.

2282 and 2283 would seem to indicate that the Church’s actual ,oral poistion on the 911 jumpers would be that they shouldn’t have done it, but their responsibility for their actions was gravely diminisihed by their circumstances (and, by extension, the reponsibility lies on Al Qaeda), and it’s up to God to figure it out.

And, to stack on that, Rare, it makes it absolutely imperative to protect human life because there is nothing waiting for us as far as we know.  That may not be a comforting thought, but that is a hell of a reason to protect people, actual people.  Jesus didn’t call dead children home.  They die because human beings permit it to happen, whether through inadequate disease prevention or deliberate warfare or inadequate food that someone, somewhere, failed to permit them to access.  (I use children because, as a parent, this is where I am most horrified, but feel free to extend this to every unnecessary death, including those in the events that spawned this discussion.)  We can’t count on the idea that people who don’t get to experience consciousness for as long as possible get to continue to do so afterwards, and living with the assumption that we’re stardust that woke up, and that we only get the time that we’re awake, means that we have a hell of a reason to keep every piece of conscious stardust awake for as long as possible.  I think that’s fucking beautiful and special and that it’s a grievous crime against a universe that managed, somehow, to produce conscious fucking stardust that we so casually permit it to lapse back into sleep without experiencing the fullest.  I am not saying that theists don’t value human life - many do, for different reasons - but, for me, life is so much more valuable now that it is finite and random.

However, to clarify, I do not think that our obligation to keep our fellow conscious bits of matter alive extends to a right to guilt the ones who decide that they are tired of the ride or to shame and horrify the families of those who decide to do so.  Just to put that back in the context of the conversation.  I think that this falls under a requirement that we should also work as hard as we can to make the experience of consciousness as wonderful for everyone as possible, and shaming and guilting does not fall under that category.  At all.

“Theological wankery is all fun and games when it’s abstract bullshitting, but when it comes to people’s real life experiences, it can create unnecessary trauma.”

I’ve lived that, and it’s not pleasant.

Yesterday, I wrote about precisely that. My mother was a devout Catholic, my father a lapsed Protestant (of some sort.)

Although they were denied a religious marriage ceremony by the Church in the late 1940s, in order for my mother to be allowed to remain a practicing Catholic, while marrying a non-Catholic, my father had to sign a pledge that any children would be raised Catholic.

I don’t recall even one comforting moment from Catholiscism when I was a child. A Mass in Latin I didn’t understand, and was bored stiff by. Sunday school lessons that seemed at best arbitrary (mortal sins = murder, adultery, missing Mass on Sunday), or callous (little pagan babies consigned to Limbo when they died, never to see the face of God, because they hadn’t been baptized Catholic.)

The balance of Sunday school lessons seemingly designed to instill fear and/or guilt.

I had nightmares from the colored slides of “the damned being tortured in hell” nuns thought appropriate to show to 7 year-olds in Sunday school. (Slides that, obviously, as a adult, I realized were of scenes from medieval paintings—a fine point the nuns never bothered to explain to frightened children.)

I also remember staying home sick from Mass, worried that if I were hit by a truck before I would be taken to confession the next week, I’d spent eternity burning in hell (yet another comforting example from the local nun Sunday school teachers.)

I remember tuning into a televised Mass (don’t have a clue why a mass would televised be in New Jersey in the ‘50s, but it was.) But still worried that wouldn’t satisfied the dogma or an angry God: would watching Mass on TV exempt me from hell—or at least, assign me to only hundreds of years suffering purgatory instead?

Funny to recall 50 years later, ghost stories to frighten children.

My mother died when I was 10, and after I was confirmed at 12, my father considered his part of the bargain complete. I’d never been comfortable in Catholicism, and his refusal to drive his children to the Church tormented me only briefly, before I lost my religion.

But when I was 19, I learned that my devout Catholic mother had committed suicide. A whole new torment on several levels.

Clinically depressed, she’d been prescribed “tranquilizers” by a psychiatrist. Barbituates, actually, promoted by the drug companies in the 1950s as a cure for “bored” housewives, and doled out en mass by doctors to women of the period. Barbituates, which medical science later acknowleged deepened depression, rather than providing “tranquility.”

I no longer believed my mother was damned for all eternity—obviously, her hell had been on earth—but it was painful enough to imagine the added mental anguish that would have been suffered by a woman taught to believe she was assigning herself to hell for all eternity.

That, I can’t forgive Catholicism.

Phoenician: The Catholic Church may have modified their stance on suicide (making it up as they go along.)

However, in 1960 when my mother committed suicide, she was denied burial in conscecrated ground, in a Catholic cemetary.

What a comfort that must have been to her Catholic parents!

I also think you have to distinguish between the legacy of a religious belief and what a religion currently teaches.  For example, the Catholic Church is absolutely responsible for the legacy of its teachings on suicide.  But it doesn’t actually hold that if you commit suicide you’re going to hell.  The catechism acknowledges that suicide is often the result of mental illness, fear, or suffering, and says that people who commit suicide are not necessarily going to hell.  The Code of Canon Law was amended in 1983 to lift the restriction on burial rites for people who committed suicide. 

Suicide is starting to be seen as treated as the public health issue that it is by medical, educational, media, and political institutions, because our view of it is evolving and improving, so it’s not surprising that religious institutions might also come to share in that evolution and improvement.  If someone tells you that a given religion teaches X, it might be worth doing some research.  (I can’t speak to other religions, but it amazes me how little Catholics (let alone non-Catholics) actually know about what the church teaches.)  I can’t speak to all denominations, of course, but after the U.S. Surgeon General’s 2000 Call to Action on suicide, a number of mainline churches, including Lutheran, Methodist, Episcopal, and Catholic, made a concerted effort to try to address the stigmatization of suicide.  In other words, they recognized that there was a problem and tried to find ways to fix it. 

Again, this is not to say that a religion gets a free pass whenever it changes its views on something, but sometimes a religion changes its views because it is paying attention to, for example, scientific and medical research, or because it recognizes that its previous stance was wrong and harmful.  A religious organization is like any other social institution—it changes and evolves over time—hopefully in a positive way, but like any other social institution, that’s not a given.  And positive change is often slow and uneven.  You can call it moving the goalposts, if you like.  I’m not saying that any given religion is above reproach—absolutely not—but frankly just to point out that claims that religion is eeeeevil are pretty weak when they’re based on sweeping and inaccurate generalizations.  Most mainline churches teach that compassion towards those who commit suicide *is* the appropriate response.

INTPagan - again 100% agreement.  When people say atheism makes life meaningless, I stand agape.  This life is all we get.  There is no justice pending for victims.  There is no punishment pending for the evil.  If we do not address these things here and now, and instead pass the buck to judgment in the afterlife, only then is it meaningless. 

And, since this life is all we get - and we are, in fact, impossibly and inconceivably   lucky to have been born at all - its is infinitely more important to improve ourselves, our collective situations, our collective problems, because there is no one else who can.  There is no magical invisible sky-fairy who is going to kiss our boo-boos and make everything all better.  The longer we wait, like an old school damsel-in-distress to be saved, the bigger and more daunting the problems get.

Though, I will say, we have now crossed the boundary between atheism and humanism.  Atheism is merely a lack of belief in gods - we’re talking about the real-world implications of that, which is outside the bounds of atheism. 

Now, to bring it round back to the topic:  I wonder if suicide became a hell-bound sin in religion’s eyes because it’s a clear representation of religion’s failure.  If god is supposed to save everyone, and religion makes everyone so happy and loving - a suicide flies directly in the face of those pretty lies. 

sure, they can say that person failed to do something, that person is bad, etc etc.  Still doesn’t mitigate the fact that god didn’t help them, didn’t save them etc.

“we’re stardust that woke up.”

Stardust.
That woke up.

Wow.

I am going to treasure that phrase for ever and ever and ever.  Awesome-sauce.

“Kit-Kat—like how? How should we treat death by suicide? Should we piss on the grave? Should we guilt trip the family because there was MORE THEY COULD HAVE DONE to prevent it? How should we treat suicide if not like “wow, that’s so terrible, we’re so sorry that this happened to you and that this illness took your loved one from you.”

What?  I suppose I was speaking from a public health perspective.  I thought that was kind of obvious from my posts.  I’m pretty sure I haven’t said anything that suggests that I think we should stigmatize suicide.  Because I don’t.  Frankly, as someone who struggles with depression, I think I have plenty of compassion for others who likewise struggle.  I just meant that suicide, unlike cancer, isn’t a disease.  It’s a symptom.

but sometimes a religion changes its views because it is paying attention to, for example, scientific and medical research, or because it recognizes that its previous stance was wrong and harmful.

All fine and good, but this renders religion useless.  Not that I disagree, of course, but if something that proclaims itself to be the moral authority of all humans changes with the times, its useless. Because that means it was once wrong, and god can’t be wrong if he’s also supposed to be the planet’s moral authority.

#44 Rare Vos

Yes, but do you know any REAL Scotsman?

Very well, then:  ALL atheist are dishonest liars because Amanda Marcotte grossly misrepresented the beliefs of the Hernandez family in order to make a trivial attack on religion.

Scotsmen cut both ways.

“Presumably, his acting like a murderous thug was no problem, because he undoubtedly received a penance and absolution for his acts before he died.”

Thank god!  We need to keep perspective on stuff like this: all he killed was a homo and the mayor of San Francisco.  Big woop…

However, if he’d been having sex with a condom on with somebody he was not married to, and had encouraged someone he knew to have an abortion after she was raped, then that would be different — that stuff is unforgivable. 

OTOH, if he was a priest and had been diddling kids for 30-years, some of whom later committed suicide, he’d still be tight with the sky-dude.

***

This religion stuff is just too gosh darn complicated.  They ought to give everyone a handy dandy pocket reference so they’d know which sins were okay and which cannot be forgiven.  It sure would help. 

(Sometimes I forget if the bread and the wine are merely symbolically the body and the blood of Jesus, or if they really become the literal body and blood of Jesus on the way down after consumption.  And what about that whole trinity thing?  And what does it really take to break the cycle of death and rebirth?  Is it okay to worship Ganesha?  If I die in jihad against the infidel, will there be 72 virgins waiting for me?  It’s really a pain to keep this shit straight…)

Several people pointed out to Amanda in the original comment thread that not all religions stigmatize suicide, and not all religions promote the idea of hell: the PostSecret postcard (which, in fairness, is not an artform in which one can do much with nuance) simply subsumed all the world religions into Christianity, which does indeed contain the dogma that a loving and benevolent God will send you to Hell, though (again more nuance) not all Christians believe this, not even those from sects which uphold that dogma.

So why not acknowledge that not all religions do this? Why lump all religions together as if Christianity were religion / religion = Christianity?

Repeatedly, Amanda claimed she hadn’t been doing this - that it would have been offensive if she had, but she hadn’t, she was just making the point that some religions do this.

...in the followup post, we find that she was just mentally dismissing all those bothersome Jews and Shintoists and pagans and Buddhists as Not My Nigelists.

Well well. So she was being that stupidly offensive.

Agreed in re: atheism and humanism.

I think that the reason that it became a hellbound sin was that they created a conundrum for logical people - if they paint the Earth as a miserable place that is ruled by Satan and that we have to live through in order to get to Heaven, but suicide isn’t banned, then what thinking person wouldn’t skip all that bullshit and just go straight to the prize?  It’s part of why so many fundies spend so much time waxing poetic about the Rapture.  They’re not living for this.  They’re living for what they get after, and it’s a tragedy.  Suicide is very, very logical when you have a belief system in which life sucks and then you die and get your sky cake.  Hence, you don’t get to skip your time as a regular Joe just working to keep the upper classes afloat.  Born into a lower-class household?  Scrape to get by?  Tough shit; you don’t get your sky cake unless you keep right on trucking.  It’s a tool to keep the proles in line, nothing more, but it leads to interesting problems once you take it out of the economic system in which it originated (although it still does apply to a certain degree).

Jesurgislac, the postcard does not subsume all of the world religions into that, nor does Amanda.  Amanda, and the postcard, are using this smaller point to make a larger point about the harmful nature of religion.  They’re not saying that all religion is harmful because all religion condemns suicide.  They’re saying that all religion is harmful because it encourages lies which, while comforting, can turn nasty very, very quickly, since they are not checked by reality.  It’s that simple.  I do not understand what is so difficult to grasp about this, and I’m getting to the point where I think that you have to be disingenuous in order to not understand this.  They are “not my Nigel"ists because they deny that THEIR lies can lead to anything harmful, not because they deny that their religions condemn suicide.  FFS, people, read critically for five seconds.

I just meant that suicide, unlike cancer, isn’t a disease.  It’s a symptom.

Oh for fuck’s sake. Here’s my original quote with extra helpful emphasis.

Suicide needs to be fucking taken off the table with religion.
[...]
We need to treat suicide like we would treat death by any other disease.

Note, I said, WITH RELIGION, not “medically” or “epidimiologically.” If you want to split this hair, at least split it on what I said. Religion has zero right to tell people who are grieving the loss of their loved ones that the death of their loved one is in any way different to losing your loved one to cancer. Because the basic facts remain the same: Your loved one had a disease, and it killed them. As far as providing comfort, and observing rites, there should be
NO
FUCKING
DIFFERENCE.

Like everything else, apparently when religion is good, it’s because it came from God, when it’s not, it’s man’s fault for screwing it up.  I prefer not to be in a permanent one-down position myself.

An interesting article on how we react to the falling man picture:
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/201191014413515812.html

A point that I’ve heard Christopher Hitchens make multiple times:

“Good people will do good things and bad people will do bad things, only religion can convince a good person to do bad things.”

Absent religion, is there any coherent means of criticizing the choice of those that jumped?

And by the way, for all the people thinking very hard about why EVERY religion and their attitudes towards suicide weren’t discussed, let me introduce you to the concept of “necessary vs. sufficient.”

Religion is a necessary but not sufficient condition of generating angst over the jumpers.  Without religion there would be no issue, and the presence of some generic “religion” is not sufficient to generate the perverse “morality” that shovels shame onto the memories of humans trapped in an impossible circumstance.

One can easily imagine, say, a version of Zen Buddhism that celebrates jumping in those circumstances.  Then we’d have a population of people feeling shame if their loved ones didn’t appear in the pictures of the jumpers.  That’s the deal with religion: when you’re just making shit up, there aren’t any rules, and even the loosest notions of rationality can be freely ignored.

So yes, there are plenty of religions with their own set of fantasy stories that wouldn’t condemn the behavior of the jumpers, but thinking this is relevant is to fail completely at a basic understanding of logic.  Just because religion is necessary for that shame, that doesn’t mean “religion,” as a generic entity, is sufficient, and no one, at any point, ever made that argument.

For very good reasons, we stigmatize suicide.

As someone who as spent entirely too much time wrestling with this particular issue, let me tell you in no uncertain terms that stigmatising suicide is NOT FUCKING HELPING. It is, in fact, the OPPOSITE of helping - because it makes it vastly more difficult to ask for help, at a time when it is already almost impossible to ask for help. So fuck you right in the ear with a rusty spoon.

They’re saying that all religion is harmful because it encourages lies which, while comforting, can turn nasty very, very quickly, since they are not checked by reality.

I’m an atheist. I’ve never seen the point of making up harmful lies that all religion is harmful.

God does not exist. People invented religions.

I don’t see that I need to be at war with or tell lies about all religious people: and if I were ignorant enough (as Amanda apparently is!) to believe that all religions are the same and that people pointing out differences between religions are just doing a “Not my Nigel!” I certainly wouldn’t go around vaunting my ignorance and pretending that being ignorant as fuck about all religions except the one local to you is a sound reason for being an atheist.

The only sound reason for being an atheist, by the way, is having figured out that there is no God and all religions are equal in one way - they’ve been invented by human beings as stories about the universe.

Comment #63: oldfeminist:  Of course, when religious people are good, it’s because they are naturally decent and religion hasn’t managed to corrupt them utterly, but when they are bad, it’s because religion is evil and corrupting.

Comment #61: INTPagan: Fair enough, but if you’re going to condemn religion because it facilitates lies, and you lie, unintentionally spread untruths, or distort facts while doing it, you really ought not fly off the handle because someone (1) asks you for factual support for your claim or (2) calls you on your false or over-general statements.  It’s possible your argument is true even if this particular example isn’t true, or isn’t entirely true; fine.  But it’s completely fair for people to point out that you are using a bad example, or that they disagree with all or part of the factual premise of your example.  Labeling anyone who does that as defensive or an apologist or whatever doesn’t help you. 

Look, I have no dog in this fight.  I don’t have the foggiest idea what happens to us after we die, and if there’s a hell, I surely have no idea who’s in it, or whether anyone’s in it at all.  I completely agree that no one should be told that their loved one is in hell because he or she committed suicide.  But I think it’s fair to ask that if you’re making an assertion, whether about the social effects of religion or any other topic, you ought to expect to provide proof and speak accurately.

Post 66 proves it’s not just the religious who fail to understand the necessary/sufficient distinction.

As way of illustration, let’s assume there’s some awesome religion somewhere that doesn’t say anything negative about suicide? So?  Does that have any bearing on the unnecessary shame generated by the religions that do stigmatize suicide?

How about a little Godwin on this Tuesday:

A: Nazis are bastards.
B: HOW DARE YOU!! Don’t you know there are Germans that don’t want to put Jews in ovens?
A: Uh, yeah, but the Nazis are still bastards.

I suppose all of this religious whining emerges from Amanda’s failure to specify which sect of which fairy tale bullshit religion she was referring to.  The act of believing made up nonsense is the background cause of irrational, senseless notions instantiated in this case, by certain Christian sects, as “the jumpers are going to hell.”  The fact that other bullshit fairy tale religions don’t abide by that specific instantiation of their nonsensical “belief without reason” system is relatively meaningless.  They’re faults simply lie elsewhere.

*their*...stupid lack of proofreading…

@ 67: “Of course, when religious people are good, it’s because they are naturally decent and religion hasn’t managed to corrupt them utterly, but when they are bad, it’s because religion is evil and corrupting.”

There is no “good” act done by a religious person that cannot be done by the non-religious.  Charity, kindness, sympathy, people who do not believe in magic sky-people are able to do all of that.

There are, however, a great many evil acts that cannot be done absent religion.  IN this case, no one would dream of condemning the 9-11 jumpers absent some old book of fables.  Or try to reason your way to murdering thousands of Jews because of “desecration of the host.”  Yes, countless people were tortured and murdered in Europe because Christians believed Jews were disrespecting a loaf of bread that they thought magically turned into Jesus, or some shit.

Again, necessary vs. sufficient.  Bad acts can be done by the religious and non-religious, alike, but there is a unique set of evil singular to religion.  Religion is required to convince people to carve up their daughters’ genitals, for example.

INTPagan @61:

“I think that the reason that it became a hellbound sin was that they created a conundrum for logical people - if they paint the Earth as a miserable place that is ruled by Satan and that we have to live through in order to get to Heaven, but suicide isn’t banned, then what thinking person wouldn’t skip all that bullshit and just go straight to the prize?  It’s part of why so many fundies spend so much time waxing poetic about the Rapture.  They’re not living for this.  They’re living for what they get after, and it’s a tragedy.  Suicide is very, very logical when you have a belief system in which life sucks and then you die and get your sky cake.”

Um, we are NOT talking about the people who flew the planes into the building; we are talking about the ones who jumped out.  Or, were you saying that the hijackers were the logical ones?

-Jut

Haven’t had a chance to read the comments above or in the previous post, but I wanted to quickly share an experience I had with this.  Several years ago, I attended the Catholic funeral mass of a much loved co-worker who had committed suicide.  The priest made a particular point of telling the congregation numerous times that he was absolutely certain that my co-worker was in heaven.  I have been to other Catholic funerals that didnt include that kind of statement at all.

Now, if I understand correctly, Catholic doctrine teaches that suicides go to hell, period, and I am not aware of any “mitigating circumstances” in my colleague’s death, such as being trapped like the WTC jumper.  So I think the priest was being a good guy and contradicting the doctrine of his own church in order to bring comfort to the many people who loved my colleague. 

But that tells me that Amanda is quite right.  The fact that the priest felt he had to stress over and over again that my friend was in heaven tells me that he had reason to believe that many people would be worried that my friend had been sent to hell due to his suicide.

Comment #72: Laurie—you don’t understand correctly.  Catholic doctrine does not teach that suicides go to hell, period, but does teaches that suicide is often the result of mental illness.  So the priest was stressing that probably because he knew that people mistakenly believed that suicide = hell was church teaching and he wanted to correct them.

ry well, then:  ALL atheist are dishonest liars because Amanda Marcotte grossly misrepresented the beliefs of the Hernandez family in order to make a trivial attack on religion.

Scotsmen cut both ways.

LOL suuuure it does.  Religion is a shared dogma, a shared belief set, a shared holy text, etc.  Atheism is nothing but a lack of belief in gods.  That’s it. 

Therefore, there are racist atheists, anti-choice atheists, libertarian atheists - etc.  You won’t hear any atheist saying “oh they’re not a REAL atheist like me” wrt anything but a belief in deities.

You will however hear, as we saw from you, that people who believe in the same god as you aren’t REAL believers - like you are, evidently - because, even though they believe in the same god, they do it slightly differently.

Not at all the same thing. Which, of course, you already knew.

I’m not religious and I agree that the suicide stigma is terrible.  It’s bullshit, absolutely, and it is one of the many things wrong with the religions I’ve rejected.  That said, it surprises me that we’re talking about suicide with the Twin Towers people at all, considering they were murdered.

And also, maybe this came up in the other thread but I’m not sure…  I don’t think all, or maybe even most, of the jumpers from the Towers were committing suicide.  I know that this is probably just my own brand of woo but I would probably have been a jumper, and the reason is that I’ve read a story or two over the course of my life about people falling from great heights and surviving.  In the face of being trapped and burned/asphyxiated/crushed to death, I could imagine taking my chances with jumping/falling instead.  But I would be hoping- irrationally definitely, but still hoping- that I would survive the fall. 

I’m not in the business of making the lives of religious folk easier, but isn’t that what most people think about the people who jumped?  And that makes it not suicide.  Radically removing yourself from the scene of trauma and certain death is, to me at least, a completely different act.

Ah, but it makes no matter your logic Eileen: the families of several of the 9/11 victims suffered even more pain—needlessly—because of what they believed their religion taught.

And that’s the point.

Comment #70: doubtthat

Sorry, but mass murder is not unique to religion.  Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot killed millions in furtherance of an explicitly anti-religious political doctrine.  The Rwandan genocide was not religiously motivated.  FGM predates both Christianity and Islam—indeed, people practice it in contradiction to the official statements of those religions. 

Religion is not a necessary condition for any particular act of cruelty.  It may be the motivation in a specific circumstance, or it may enable people to overcome their natural scruples, but it is not unique in that way. 

They’re saying that all religion is harmful because it encourages lies which, while comforting, can turn nasty very, very quickly, since they are not checked by reality.  It’s that simple.  I do not understand what is so difficult to grasp about this, and I’m getting to the point where I think that you have to be disingenuous in order to not understand this.

I still say we’re dealing with a circle-the-wagons type impulse.  When you criticize something someone is excessively emotionally invested in, this is the reaction you will get - complete resistence to basic truth. 

I have seen this in atheists too - they may not believe, but in criticizing religion you’re criticizing a loved one.  purely a hypothosis, natch.

There are, however, a great many evil acts that cannot be done absent religion.  ... Or try to reason your way to murdering thousands of Jews because of “desecration of the host.”  Yes, countless people were tortured and murdered in Europe because Christians believed Jews were disrespecting a loaf of bread that they thought magically turned into Jesus, or some shit.

The Nazis didn’t need religion to kill more Jews than had been killed all the centuries of religious persecution. Just as there is no good thing done by religion that could not also be done without religion, there is no bad thing done by religion that could not also be done without religion.

Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot killed millions in furtherance of an explicitly anti-religious political doctrine.

I think this is an important point - humans can be evil, regardless of whether or not they are religious.  I mean, yes, Stalin et al were not murdering people in the name of atheism, but in the name of self-deification or irrational adherence to a political ideology.  But, the simple point that a lot of people fail to grasp is, we’re animals.  All of us.  No one, regardless of belief status, is immune.

I disagree though that religion is not unique.  Perhaps I’m wrong here, but what other invention of human kind as the power over us, collectively, that religion does?

Jutgory: Read the comment thread preceding that and you will see that I’m clearly addressing the reasoning behind banning suicide, not the reasoning behind anyone who commits it now.

“Ah, but it makes no matter your logic Eileen: the families of several of the 9/11 victims suffered even more pain—needlessly—because of what they believed their religion taught.”

Yes, definitely.  And that’s horrible.  And saying that it isn’t a common feature of Christianity at least is bullshit.  Many people arrange workarounds and purposeful blind spots in their understanding of theology so they don’t have to give up the church they love, but that doesn’t mean that the objectionable dogma isn’t built in.  It is.

Rare Vos, I’m one of those who would disagree with Hitchens because plenty of other things override the basic goodness of good people, among which I would group racism, sexism, political affiliation, cults of personality, and the like.  Those are a few that I can name off the top of my head.  I don’t think that religion itself is the problem; I think it’s the tendency to blindly follow, and religion just so happens to top the list.  I don’t delude myself into thinking that we would be all peachy-keen without religion; we’d just find something new, but hopefully I would fight that, too.

The thing I always find frustrating/annoying about the way religion gets talked about here is not that you don’t make distinctions between the actual beliefs of various religions (which can be significant), but that you treat religion like it is always and only the institutional/dogmatic edifice and the “cause god said so” revealed truth. Well, that certainly is one aspect of religion, but it’s not the one that many religious people believe in or engage in or practice.

If religions are human inventions (which I think we agree, they are) then they can be whatever people want them to be. There is no “real” religion that the liberal theists or the culturally attached non-theists are deviating from.

“Ah, but it makes no matter your logic Eileen: the families of several of the 9/11 victims suffered even more pain—needlessly—because of what they believed their religion taught.”

But what if they believed wrongly?  Does it matter that their suffering was the result of misunderstanding the teachings of whatever religion they belonged to?  Would it matter if their local priest told them they were wrong? 

“Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot killed millions in furtherance of an explicitly anti-religious political doctrine.”

Saying Pol Pot and Stalin did it too doesn’t neutralize the point that organized religion is a really good delivery device for mass murder.

I disagree though that religion is not unique.  Perhaps I’m wrong here, but what other invention of human kind as the power over us, collectively, that religion does?

I think you could make a good case that nationalism (or, if you prefer, nationalisms) does.

OT but I just had a discussion with some religious women over at a board called “Dealing with In Laws and Family of Origin” in which a poster assured me that a single bad religious leader of a small group (one of those weekly bible study meetings) could, if she were bad at her job, cause people to “lose their eternal salvation.”  I challenged her on that by arguing that to believe that one person’s failing could cost (as she saw it) another person their eternal life/afterlife was really bizarrly priviliging one person’s actions for another person’s fate. But she stuck with it. We couldn’t really get into a big argument since the board doesn’t tolerate that.

But what I’m trying to say is that for certain Christian Sects there is a presumption in favor of hell—people must be saved from it. People are heading their first and only by turning away, or being turned away, can they be saved. But a Buddhist point of view, or some other Christian ones, presumes that everyone is going to heaven or will eventually be saved or will enjoy an afterlife with closeness to g-d at some point or another through their own choices or g-d’s choice. 

Those two perspectives are radically opposed and can’t really coexist even though they often use the same name of g-d and even talk past each other with the same scriptures. Believing that person X is going to hell, whether because they did something wrong or because some Christian person failed to witness to them properly, is a talismanic form of thinking which presumes that the speaker himself/herself is going to heaven because of luck or being in the right place at the right time. In effect judging other people, worrying about the salvation of other people, becomes a form of magical thinking.  And contradicting that viewpoint—arguing that everyone gets saved or that a person’s salvation really can’t depend on the actions or inactions of one asshole at a public meeting—turns out to be a very discomfiting notion for these people.  They become offended when you’d think they’d rejoice.

aimai

Nationalism!  Yes, that!  I knew that I was forgetting the biggest one ever, and thank you.

Kit-Kat at #85

Wouldn’t the people you posit be happier and better adjusted if they didn’t participate in a group that allowed this to be subject for debate in the first place?  If we tally up the entirety of what the Christian god teaches and demonstrates in his book, we are left with a picture of a dangerously psychopathic all-powerful being.  I find no comfort in that, and I think that people who participate in Christianity have to tell themselves many lies and half-truths in order to not be horrified by their god.

“cause god said so” revealed truth. Well, that certainly is one aspect of religion, but it’s not the one that many religious people believe in or engage in or practice.

You’ve just pointed out that most people who participate in organized religion have to be hypocritical in their beliefs in order to happily continue.  This is not a selling point for me.

To add to chingona’s comment:  When you’re condemning religion as a whole, you’re lumping an awful lot of stuff in together.  Wiccans believe very different things and have different practices than Buddhists, or Catholics, or Muslims, or Sikhs, or Jews, or Shintoists, etc.  There is a difference between what official churches teach and the practices and beliefs at ground level.  Religions change over time. 

The trend I’m seeing is that of treating “religion” as some giant malevolent monolith that operates the same regardless of its specific manifestation.  But it isn’t.  It’s a word that describes a multitude of human belief systems and institutions.  To say that a liberal theist is trying to “move the goal posts” is to insist on a definition of religion that doesn’t describe what religion actually is or how it works in the world.

I think you could make a good case that nationalism (or, if you prefer, nationalisms) does.

But, the basis of nationalism tends to be religious. I.e. our god rules, he blessed our country special-like, so we’re divinely-mandated to be awesome and rule everything and everyone.

Or, at the very least, stems from the same place that religion seems to - tribalism.

I had to roll my eyes hard at the dander going up over this.  I appreciate that you’re an atheist but frankly to make the “no god” claim a serious fact loses the argument by definition.  The definition between deity and religion is vast and while atheism in the modern west is firmly leveled against organized religion (practically reaching for a counter-ideology) it fails to take into account humans are going to be human.  Suicide is a shameful act in practically all of the western world and most of the eastern world.  Unless you’re committing seppuku or an Indian woman who refuses to go on without your husband suicide is largely forbidden.  The idea that somebody’s family would want to remain in the belief that their loved one took the easier path to death rather than face being burned alive is a normal reaction.  As for going to hell and what not, I can’t say.  But to get into this sort of religion bashing over suicide about 9/11 is a bit of a stretch. 

For the record though the Catholic church only has a few ways to get to hell and suicide is one of them but I remember a decree coming out since this was pre-established from other situations following 9/11 that people who jumped weren’t really committing suicide so much as attempting to save themselves from a truly painful death so it isn’t an act of cowardice so much as mercy.  I can’t say for other sects but while the Catholic church frowned it understood.

Kit-Kat, it’s not a monolith, except in that this multitude of human belief systems and institutions have one thing in common, and it’s a doozy: they all encourage extra-reality methods of interacting with the world, with the obvious exception of the nontheistic religions (some Buddhism, some forms of Judaism, and the like).  Sure, people have loads of woo and pseudoscience and bullshit that they believe in absent religion, but religions all have those things in common (again, with the obvious exceptions that I just mentioned).  Religions encourage those things.  They may not be the same woo and pseudoscience and bullshit, but the proliferation of varying kinds of woo and pseudoscience and bullshit doesn’t exactly make a strong case for religion, either.  I mean, I would certainly argue, as a former pagan who didn’t bother changing my SN on here, that there are massive differences between Christianity and paganism, but that doesn’t mean that both aren’t predicated on unfalsifiable or blatantly false claims about the universe.

The trend I’m seeing is that of treating “religion” as some giant malevolent monolith that operates the same regardless of its specific manifestation.  But it isn’t.  It’s a word that describes a multitude of human belief systems and institutions.  To say that a liberal theist is trying to “move the goal posts” is to insist on a definition of religion that doesn’t describe what religion actually is or how it works in the world.

No. To say that a “liberal theist” is trying to move the goal posts is to insist that religion - by definition - requires accepting and believing utter nonsense as Ultimate Truth and THAT means it differs from the “bad” religion by only degrees.

A theist that believes in peace and does absolutely no harm to anyone is - apart from being a unicorn - still a believer in nonsense who will move the goal posts around to avoid both being equated to the baddies and to avoid having to face the reality that it is still bollocks.

Cherry-picking doesn’t cleanse the root religion.

INTPagan @81:

“Read the comment thread preceding that and you will see that I’m clearly addressing the reasoning behind banning suicide, not the reasoning behind anyone who commits it now.”

Yes, part of my response was tongue in cheek.  It just struck me that people throughout this thread (and the earlier one) were talking about how bad it was for religion to stigmatize suicide (in the context of the 911 attacks) and no one had mentioned, as far as I saw, the irony of a religion that glorified suicide (in the context of the 911 attacks).  Your comment about how it had to be made a sin because, otherwise, logical people would start offing themselves to get their prize just made that connection so perfectly.

Mighty Ponygirl @62:

“Religion has zero right to tell people who are grieving the loss of their loved ones that the death of their loved one is in any way different to losing your loved one to cancer. Because the basic facts remain the same: Your loved one had a disease, and it killed them.”

Sure it can, because they are different.  My wife’s cousin just killed herself.  The Memorial Service was last Saturday.  Had she died of cancer, everyone would have been sad, but no one would have wondered what they could have done to prevent it.  If she had died in a car accident, no one would have felt blame for what had happened.  If she had been murdered, her children would not have felt that she abandoned them.  Cancer has no intent; suicide does.

And, simply presuming that suicide is caused by disease only substitutes one stigma for another.

-Jut

“I appreciate that you’re an atheist but frankly to make the “no god” claim a serious fact loses the argument by definition.”

Is this convenient re-defining of words so we can play the “atheists are just like fundamentalists theists” game?

or did I misread?

Mighty Ponygirl:

And I think that in the same way, if a person commits suicide in such a way that someone will “find them unawares” (ie, come home from school and find your dad hanging from the ceiling), that’s fucking selfish and that does harm to others.

This exact thing happened to my mother when she was 11 years old in 1949. She’s suffered from PTSD all her life; she can’t go outside during the day and eats for comfort.

With all due respect, atheism makes an unfalsifiable claim about the universe—that there is no deity.  You can’t prove it.  Whether or not any kind of god exists is basically unprovable. 

And the fact is that regardless of how it’s expressed, many people do feel a sense of wonder and mystery in the world.  Science is awesome for many, many things, but it really just doesn’t capture the full range of human experience, which includes things which are non-rational but nonetheless real.  Science can tell us how, but it can’t tell us why (why there is something rather than nothing, among other things).  I would say that religious methods of interacting with the world aren’t necessarily extra-reality, they are ways to express our sense that there is more to the world than what we see—a sense of awe.  Frankly, I don’t think of that as a “doozy” but as a fundamental expression of something in human nature.  Sure, religions tend to go much further than that, which is usually where the trouble starts, but I think that the recognition that we as a species have these feelings and longings and questions is not unjustified.  The religious impulse is pretty fundamental, regardless of the state of organized religion.

“religion - by definition - requires accepting and believing utter nonsense as Ultimate Truth” 

Well, based on that definition, sure, all religion is bad.

(ie, come home from school and find your dad hanging from the ceiling), that’s fucking selfish and that does harm to others.

If accompanied by a note that says “that’ll show you!”, then yes.

Otherwise, how do we know the motivation behind such a choice?  We’re not in their heads, we’re not privvy to the how the monster that is depression is guiding their actions.

A friend of mine’s father committed suicide by doing exactly this - he hung himself in the basement, and it was his youngest son (my friend) who found him.

The father was a Vietnam Vet who’d suffered horrible PTSD for decades. He’d suffered crippling depression and substance abuse.  He left no note.  We have no idea why he chose to hang himself in a place and at a time when it would be his youngest son who found him. 

Perhaps he thought they’d be better off. Perhaps he thought that was the best place to do it and never intended for things to go down as they did.  We don’t know.

is it fair to automatically assume it was a selfish motive?  Personally, I don’t think so.

But, the basis of nationalism tends to be religious. I.e. our god rules, he blessed our country special-like, so we’re divinely-mandated to be awesome and rule everything and everyone.

Sure, religion often is a component of nationalism and how significant a component it is varies from place to place and over time. But nationalism is more complicated than that; it also stems from such things as shared language (though not always), shared ethnic identities, historical relationships to particular spaces, shared sense of collective grievance, etc.

Phoenician: The Catholic Church may have modified their stance on suicide (making it up as they go along.)

However, in 1960 when my mother committed suicide, she was denied burial in conscecrated ground, in a Catholic cemetary.

In no Catholic doctrine is burial in consecrated ground necessary to reach heaven.

Catholicism is full of neat little ways to inflict cruelties in order to foster “community”.  Having particular sinners barred from the Official Holy Parking Lot is one of them.

Here’s what I was looking for - the Catholic Encyclopaedia on suicide.

You’ve just pointed out that most people who participate in organized religion have to be hypocritical in their beliefs in order to happily continue.  This is not a selling point for me.

I’m not trying to sell you on anything, but can you please explain what is hypocritical about saying grace over dinner while not believing that the Bible is the inerrant word of God?

Hypocrisy is believing one thing and doing another. I don’t follow how that applies.

Kit-kat, positive atheism makes that claim.  Negative atheism does not.  Perhaps I am misspeaking for the people here, but I have never actually met a serious positive atheist.  The claim is that, in the absence of evidence for a deity, we live as if there is not one and will not believe in one, or in the possibility of one, until there is evidence otherwise.  It does not require the positive belief that there is no deity; all it requires is the disbelief in one.  The shades of this tend to evade theists.

The rest of the claims that you’ve made are disproved every day by the capacity of atheists and other shades of nonbelievers to feel awe and joy at the universe.  You do not need to believe in the supernatural to interact with the world in a way that elicits awe and wonder.  Please, watch Sagan’s Cosmos.  Or, better yet, watch Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Cosmis Sermon (found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RjW5-4IiSc ; the hyperlink thing seems to be broken), and tell me that you have to believe in the supernatural or practice religion in order to experience awe.  In point of fact, I believe that religion and belief in the supernatural stops people from feeling the awe that is due the natural universe because, not understanding the lily, they gild it.  I mean, jesus, we’re STARDUST.  THAT WOKE UP.  How can you not feel awe at that?  I ask that in all seriousness.  That’s the coolest thing in the universe.  I think it’s insulting to require more, but that’s me; regardless, supernatural claims are unfalsifiable or false, and so are extrareality.

Not that it matters, but it’s colonialism, nationalism’s dark mirror, which is the real cause of the grossest brutality.

I know there’s a name for the wad of fallacies contained in #100, but for the life of me I can’t remember it.  Anyone remember? 

Look, Nigel is a great guy.  I know Nigel and like him.  He definitely doesn’t beat his wife, but that’s beside the point.  The point is that many dudes like Nigel, who appear perfectly normal, are actually abusive behind closed doors.  Not to mention all that do it openly.

If Nigel’s really a good guy (and I know he is), he won’t mind if we talk about all of those dudes’ bad behavior as part of a systemic problem without having to constantly interject that of course everyone knows that Nigel is not like those other dudes.

To take what Rare Vos and INTPagan said a step further:  why is it wrong to believe in things that can’t be proven or are counterfactual? 

Choosing the reality that goes along with some kind of wish or prejudice or tradition you hold is unproductive at best.  Once you start going down the road of believing unprovable things, it becomes easier and easier to disbelieve provable things, to ignore evidence that supports your prejudices or wishes or traditions or fantasies, to tilt the world in favor of what you want, all because it’s “right” in some way that supersedes reality.

It’s hard enough to avoid those problems if you keep religion out of the mix.  Once you say it’s okay to make pretend, it’s hard to avoid pretending in ways that are harmful to yourself or others.

I know there’s a name for the wad of fallacies contained in #100, but for the life of me I can’t remember it.  Anyone remember?
Comment #108: Rare Vos on 09/13 at 03:00 PM

False dilemma, that either religion or science is all there is.  It ignores philosophy as a source of life’s meaning.

Or it could be ad misericordiam, that if there’s no God or religion a lot of people will be unhappy.

Oldfeminist, thank you for being able to clarify what I’m never quite able to do without ending up sputtering about homeopathy and chakras.

And, since this life is all we get - and we are, in fact, impossibly and inconceivably   lucky to have been born at all

The average male ejaculate contains 280 million sperm cells.  Only one of those went on to become you, Vos.

I HOPE YOU FEEL GUILTY FOR THE OTHER 279.999.999 POTENTIAL PEOPLE YOU MURDERED TO GET HER, YOU UNFEELING BASTARD!!!.

Not that it matters, but it’s colonialism, nationalism’s dark mirror, which is the real cause of the grossest brutality.

Which, again, tends to find justification in religion.  i.e. manifest destiny.  I’m not disagreeing with Linnaeus - those other aspects of nationalism are certainly true.  But the most common, the most useful to motivate is religion. 

At least, AFAIK.  Is there a better explanation?

This is not to say that religion itself is to blame, but that is easily and very powerfully used in that fashion.

I’m still just blown away by any even breath of an idea that stigmatizing suicide is a good thing.

Admittedly, it DID help keep me alive when I was at my worst. My mom had always pounded into me how suicide was the ultimate selfish act, so when I was in my “it would be cool to drive my minivan into a concrete barrier at 90mph” phase it did have some influence. I already thought I was a horrible pile of shit and a terrible mother and spouse, that my children would be better off if I was dead and my now-ex could find himself a GOOD woman who would look after the children like they deserved. In the middle of that I was thinking, somewhere in the back of my head, “But I would be remembered as a selfish bitch by people who don’t understand that I HAVE to die to make people’s lives better.”

Maybe in a twisted, warped way it helped in that moment. But it also makes depression the rest of the time that much more to deal with, because now I have, “My dog, how could I have been such a horrible selfish person, and still am because I can’t cope….”

The average male ejaculate contains 280 million sperm cells.  Only one of those went on to become you, Vos.

I HOPE YOU FEEL GUILTY FOR THE OTHER 279.999.999 POTENTIAL PEOPLE YOU MURDERED TO GET HER, YOU UNFEELING BASTARD!!!.

LOL no, not guilty, just impossibly lucky to have won that lotto.  And I’m not going to waste that astronomically lucky event on thinking and worrying about what happens after it.

P.s.  though, Phoenician in a time of Romans, that does remind me of one my favorite Red Dwarf episodes:  “The Inquisitor”

Rare Vos, I think you’re mixing up the definitions of Selfish and Vindictive. My point stands.

Nice article, thanks for the information.

Kit Kat @2:27

Amanda originally said:

I never said that all religions were equally immoral; some objectively do temper their teachings with common sense morality, though they do so while often reserving the right to usurp common sense morality and basic human decency with theological wankery. The point was never “all religions are the same”, but that when you’re just making shit up, you can say stuff that’s traumatic as well as comforting, and so this notion that religion is okay even if it’s not true because it comforts doesn’t comport with the realities. Objectively speaking, religious lies are used just as often—-probably far more often—-to control and shame than they are to uplift and comfort.  The argument that religion is okay because it comforts is based on the false belief that because you’re lying you must be comforting, and that’s simply not true.  Religious myths are just as often—-probably more often—-used to control and shame as they are to comfort.

People are shouting that Catholicism does or doesn’t call for hell for suicides. If Benedict or the the Hernandez family posted and resolved the matter, it wouldn’t change the correctness of what Amanda says in what I quoted.

If you’re asking people to believe in an unreal world, I think that’s still dangerous even if you’re unreal world is nicer than Ratzinger’s.

can you please explain what is hypocritical about saying grace over dinner while not believing that the Bible is the inerrant word of God?

Hypocrisy is believing one thing and doing another. I don’t follow how that applies.

Why would you say Christian (or whatever) grace to a god you don’t actually believe in?  You just pick and choose what you like and what you don’t?  Doesn’t that mean you’re really just making it all up as you go along? 

Wouldn’t it be easier to rent Cosmos instead?  That’s a transcendent series and it’s, you know, fact-based.

At any rate, people are sometimes tormented by their beliefs when their lives don’t fit with the teachings of the church to which they belong.  If you’re not a member of a church, I don’t think this post was about you.

(Sometimes I forget if the bread and the wine are merely symbolically the body and the blood of Jesus, or if they really become the literal body and blood of Jesus on the way down after consumption.

The Catholic Church unfortunately bound itself to a literal rather than metaphorical interpretation of “this is my body, this is my blood” right from the start, and can’t change that tiny little pin of a decision without causing whole stacks of theological elephants balnced on top of it to topple.

So according to the Catholics, it really truly is the body and blood of Christ, but it miraculously continues to look like bread and wine.  And thus there are whole elaborate debates about “accidents” vs “substance” on the Catholic Encyclopaedia (I gotta love the line “The scientific development of the concept of Transubstantiation ...”) which seem to boil down to the idea that “breadness” exits free from actual “bread”.

WTF?

I do note that they state “The permanence of Presence, however, is limited to an interval of time of which the beginning is determined by the instant of Consecration and the end by the corruption of the Eucharistic Species. If the Host has become moldy or the contents of the Chalice sour, Christ has discontinued His Presence therein.”

But corrruption is relative, not absolute - entropy is always going downhill.  This suggests that we can conduct a set of scientific experiements to see just how much corruption there has to be before the Eucharist is no longer actual Body and Blood but merely bread and wine again.  Design of this experiment is left as an exercise to the reader, although you will have to consult your local priest for help with experiemntal materials and in measuring when the FUCK Christ is really there!!

I’ve struggled with depression and suicidal thoughts for nearly half of my lifetime. Raised Catholic, I started questioning religion about the time they told me I was going to eat actual flesh and drink actual blood, and have teetered on tepid Catholicism/agnosticism/atheism ever since, with one exception: the year after my father died. I was weak and going through a shitty time in my life, and religion did provide some semblance of comfort for me, but there was always guilt and trying to overlook just how fucked up the Church itself is for it ever to be truly comforting. I’ve hit another bad bout of depression lately and my mind has wandered back to “maybe if I just believed in God and let go it’d be better,” but somehow that just ends up making me feel even worse.

LOL suuuure it does.  Religion is a shared dogma, a shared belief set, a shared holy text, etc.

Wrong—some people make up religious beliefs that are peculiar to them.  In this case, it may be that one of the Hernandez family members believed that people who commit suicide by jumping to avoid incineration go to Hell.  Of course, we know know that isn’t true, that it was just something made up by Amanda.

Atheism is nothing but a lack of belief in gods.  That’s it.

Also wrong.  That’s certainly one very flawed definition.  There’s a great deal of scholarship on this particular issue, and I suggest you read it.  Cats, dog, books and tables “lack a belief in god,” but they’re not atheists.  And there are various strains of atheism which insist that “true” atheism can only be atheism based on particular principles of logic or science—they’d exclude someone who said “God doesn’t exist because my mommy died.”

Therefore, there are racist atheists, anti-choice atheists, libertarian atheists - etc.  You won’t hear any atheist saying “oh they’re not a REAL atheist like me” wrt anything but a belief in deities.

You will FREQUENTLY read Amanda saying that no “real” atheist could be anti-choice because it requires magical religious thinking.  And YOU just said that NO atheist would deny another’s atheism based on other than god-belief principles—yet now you are linking atheism not just with a disbelief in God, but in a particular belief in what other atheists think.

<i>You will however hear, as we saw from you, that people who believe in the same god as you aren’t REAL believers - like you are, evidently - because, even though they believe in the same god, they do it slightly differently.<i/i>

My comments were limited to whether the Hell-suicide belief (falsely) attributed to the Hernandez family by Amanda was shared by large segments of the religious population.

JutGory @ 71: way to totally fail in reading comprehension for either part of this discussion.

“I know there’s a name for the wad of fallacies contained in #100, but for the life of me I can’t remember it.  Anyone remember?”

There’s no fallacy if I’m not making an argument.  I’m not saying the religious impulse is proof of the existence of God, I’m saying that the religious impulse is pretty fundamental to human nature, and responding to that impulse is not a “doozy” or necessarily “extra-reality” or “predicated on false claims about the Universe.”  In response to a particular claim that that’s what all religions (except some) have in common.

And the fact is that regardless of how it’s expressed, many people do feel a sense of wonder and mystery in the world.

Many of them are scientists or atheists. But, I get so tired of being told that “atheists can’t do ___.” It just annoys those of us who do.

helen w.h. @126:
“way to totally fail in reading comprehension for either part of this discussion”

Way to make a totally inciteful and illuminating point that clarifies any ambiguities in what you are talking about.  Given my apparent problems with reading comprehesnsion, I have no idea what your point is, but I am sure it must have been good.

And, if you failed to read my follow-up comment at 97, you might have understood my point in #71.

You know…that thing about reading comprehension you were talking about.  Context matters.
-Jut

mentally dismissing all those bothersome Jews and Shintoists and pagans and Buddhists

Uh, under the Shinto religion, to sacrifice ones’ life for Tenno Hirohito in WWII, was considered an honorable death, comparable to the 72 virgins reward for adherents of Islam.

In this case, it may be that one of the Hernandez family members believed that people who commit suicide by jumping to avoid incineration go to Hell.  Of course, we know know that isn’t true, that it was just something made up by Amanda.

Really, where did Amanda write that?

And of COURSE I’m making it up as I go along.  We all are.  No one is born knowing what they’re doing, nor do we ever reach some magical point where we’ve totally got everything figured out, and anyone, atheist or religious, who refuses to sometimes change their views as a result of facts and experiences is stupid.

I know there’s a name for the wad of fallacies contained in #100, but for the life of me I can’t remember it.  Anyone remember?

No real fallacy, as far as I can see. 

“With all due respect, atheism makes an unfalsifiable claim about the universe—that there is no deity.  You can’t prove it.  Whether or not any kind of god exists is basically unprovable.”

This is a standard agnostic position.  There may be SOME gods that can be disproven because their very definition contains some logical contradiction, but you could certainly construct some definition of God that is consistent.  And you couldn’t disprove it exists one way or the other, any way you can prove or disproof that life on other planets exists.

As for the rest of Kit Kat’s thoughts, they’re perfectly reasonable.  How the universe appeared, how consciousness developed out of unconscious matter, really aren’t very well explained by science.  That doesn’t prove there’s a god, but it at least gives rise to a reasonable supposition that something conscious might have been behind it all.  As David Hume said, “the religious skeptic, eventually
concedes that “the cause or causes of order in the universe probably bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.”

“Many of them are scientists or atheists. But, I get so tired of being told that “atheists can’t do ___.” It just annoys those of us who do.”

Again, I’m not saying that.  Of course atheists can be good people, can feel awe at creation, and otherwise be super awesome people.  I wasn’t arguing that—I was making a much narrower point about the origins of the religious impulse in response to a claim about what religions had in common.  I have never in my life attempted to persuade someone else of the existence of god and I’m not about to start on a blog.

You can say that something is not a good idea without creating a stigma about it. Frankly, I don’t see how you can stigmatize suicide without also stigmatizing people with suicidal ideation. And there’s strong evidence that creating stigmas around problems like risky sexual behavior and drug use actually makes those problems worse, as opposed to education/support/recovery models which reduce the social risks of seeking out birth control and/or treatment for addictions.

LaurenHarrisonSmith: There’s a great deal of scholarship on this particular issue, and I suggest you read it.

Which scholarship in particular are you referring to?

And there are various strains of atheism which insist that “true” atheism can only be atheism based on particular principles of logic or science—they’d exclude someone who said “God doesn’t exist because my mommy died.”

Certainly, but those strains do not exclusively define atheism, nor do they do so authoritatively. Even as much as “New Atheism” has become something of the new boogeyman in these discussions, actually reading the “four horsemen” reveals that they don’t always agree with each other.

seem to boil down to the idea that “breadness” exits free from actual “bread”.

Yep, that’s Platonic idealism for you. It does sound really strange to modern ears, where philosophical materialism is a shared default assumption (it’s funny that it has so won the debate that even people who explicitly reject it tend to live their actual lives according to its precepts).

In short: the material manifestation of ‘bread’ is simply an instance of the ideal concept of Bread which is eternal and exists in a realm of pure idea (just like every triangle in the world is just a pale imperfect copy of the idea of Triangle, which is perfect as it is a pure abstract geometric form). Breadness is an essential characteristic of physical bread. Transubstiation replaces Breadness with Christness, even if to our stupid philosophical materialist eyes it still looks, tastes, smells and has the chemical composition and burns for the exact same amount of joules as bread.

And if you ask how that can be, well, because that’s why.

LaurenHarrisonSmith: This is a standard agnostic position.  There may be SOME gods that can be disproven because their very definition contains some logical contradiction, but you could certainly construct some definition of God that is consistent.  And you couldn’t disprove it exists one way or the other, any way you can prove or disproof that life on other planets exists.

Which is both compatible with atheism, and characteristic of the epistemological turn that both atheism and modern apologetics have taken in the, ohh, last century of scholarship on the issue. Since modern and post-modern theistic arguments have largely decided to punt on the existence of god(s) to and focus instead on the reasonableness of belief, atheists have also given up on the morass of ontological arguments in favor of justified doubt.

My wife’s cousin just killed herself.  The Memorial Service was last Saturday.  Had she died of cancer, everyone would have been sad, but no one would have wondered what they could have done to prevent it.  If she had died in a car accident, no one would have felt blame for what had happened.

Cancer:

“What if I’d been on her to get that mammogram earlier.”

“What if I got him to quit smoking.”

“What if I had vaccinated her against HPV.”

The car accident analogy is different, because a car accident is not a disease.

There are plenty of ways to blame yourself for “not doing enough” when a loved one dies of a disease, any disease.

The role of religion in any situation where people are grieving the loss of a loved one should be to comfort people, not to pick at the wounds of doubt and fear. I don’t understand why this is such a difficult concept for people.

Kit-Kat:

“You will FREQUENTLY read Amanda saying that no “real” atheist could be anti-choice because it requires magical religious thinking.”

Name me a time when she’s said that.

You haven’t yet addressed why belief in the supernatural is fundamental to the human need to express awe and wonder about the universe, nor have you addressed the parts where I’ve made it perfectly clear that, in fact, not only is it unnecessary for religion to be part of a person’s life in order for them to express that awe, but that gilding the lily in that way makes it difficult for people to express awe about the universe that actually is rather than the universe that they wish was.  You also have not addressed the explanation that I gave in which I made clear that there are different kinds of atheism, many of which do not involve the explicit and categorical denial of the existence of a deity.  Perhaps I would have been called an agnostic twenty or thirty years ago - Sagan called himself an agnostic - but I self-identify as an atheist because I do not believe in a deity, even if I don’t say that I am positive that there is none.

Jut, I misread the snark, and well-done.

#77: “Sorry, but mass murder is not unique to religion.  Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot killed millions in furtherance of an explicitly anti-religious political doctrine.  The Rwandan genocide was not religiously motivated.  FGM predates both Christianity and Islam—indeed, people practice it in contradiction to the official statements of those religions.”

The comforting thing about religious people is that they’re arguments never change.  This is a necessary result of their abandonment of the only method we have for learning things: science.  Thus, same old bullshit over and over.

First, that post was written in response to my statements but evince no comprehension on your part.  In fact, I quite clearly state that people will do bad things regardless of their specific belief or lack thereof.  Again, there is no good thing done through religion that is not done by non-believers, but there are a great many evil things that religion causes that would never exist without it.  People would not be killed for disrespecting crackers in a world without religion.

Second, to claim that communist atrocities are somehow the responsibility of “atheism” is to completely misunderstand what the word means and project retarded religious belief structures onto the concept.  Atheism is a lack of belief, it implies no positive ideas.  Both you and Hitler were atheists with respect to the divinity of Krishna, is your Krishna-atheism therefore responsible for the Holocaust?  It’s a nonsensical argument.  Both you and Ted Bundy didn’t believe the Tooth Fairy was real, what does that say about what the two of you do believe in?

Finally, the communists were not spreading atheism, per se, they were, for the most part, combating existing religious belief in their population and seeking to replace it with a worship of Dear Leader.  North Korea is very much a theocracy, with Lil’ Kim as the god.  Again, atheism implies no positive belief, unlike religion.  The communists were not fighting in the name of rationality and the method of inquiry that seeks to reinforce hypotheses with empirical evidence.  No wars have been waged to spread String Theory. 

Religion is not a necessary condition for any particular act of cruelty.  It may be the motivation in a specific circumstance, or it may enable people to overcome their natural scruples, but it is not unique in that way.

This is just a blatantly false statement.  Without religion, thousands of Jews would not have been murdered because they disrespected loaves of bread.  What you mean to say is that religion is not a necessary condition of all acts of cruelty, which is true and a point I made in my initial statement, but absolutely particular acts of cruelty depend entirely on religion.  Iranian mothers would not be cheering the death of their children in mine fields during the Iran-Iraq War if they didn’t believe in some nonsense about an afterlife.

#79: “The Nazis didn’t need religion to kill more Jews than had been killed all the centuries of religious persecution. Just as there is no good thing done by religion that could not also be done without religion, there is no bad thing done by religion that could not also be done without religion.”

First, the Nazis weren’t atheists.  Hitler was baptized a Catholic, never renounced his baptism, and, in fact, the German Church celebrated his birthday as a religious holiday up to the very end of the war.  The foundations of the Holocaust were the thousand years of Jewish oppression based on Christian teaching.  Before the Nazis, there were regular inquisitions and atrocities committed against the Jews (they killed Jesus, they disrespected our bread, they poisoned our wells with the plague…etc.).  Hitler took advantage of that long-standing religious belief, he did not create antisemitism out of whole cloth.

But again, there are absolutely a large number of evil things that never would be done without religion.  Maybe, if you need some psychologically soothing thought to rationalize your ridiculous religious beliefs, the vacuum of atrocities left by the lack of religion would just be replaced by some non-religious atrocities, but again, absent religion no one would have been killed for failing to properly respect the supernatural characteristics of a loaf of bread.  The examples are literally endless.

Lots of answers I could give.

But there’s a small part of me that just has to go back to Theology and say “technically, in all instances of Christianity of which I’m aware, no one can legitimately judge the fate of those who jumped, unless they know why. A person who jumps because they think there’s an infinitesimal chance of surviving the fall, and none of surviving the fire, is not committing suicide.”

“Kit-Kat:

  “You will FREQUENTLY read Amanda saying that no “real” atheist could be anti-choice because it requires magical religious thinking.”

Name me a time when she’s said that.”

I can’t, because I didn’t write that statement.

Apologies for misattribution.  That doesn’t nullify the remainder of what I said to you.

With all due respect, atheism makes an unfalsifiable claim about the universe—that there is no deity.  You can’t prove it.  Whether or not any kind of god exists is basically unprovable.

Atheism is the state of not believing in a deity. One can be an atheist without making a positive claim (“there is no god or gods”).

For example: is there a person with three functioning arms? I don’t believe there are.

But I’m not saying “there are no people with three functioning arms”.

I know that it would violate my understanding of how the body works. My understanding is that, if someone did have a third arm, it wouldn’t function - the nerves wouldn’t be wired right. So, I don’t believe in three armed people.

If someone did bring a person forth with three functioning arms, I’d be skeptical, but willing to be convinced. But - since the existence of three armed people has no bearing on my life, I really don’t care. I have an answer: there are no people with three functioning arms.

An atheist can make a similar claim: not saying “there *is no god*” but simply saying that it’s not important to them, and they don’t have any positive belief that there is such a being.

Note that this is different from an agnostic. An agnostic is a person who does not have gnosis. An agnostic has a question that is *not* answered to their satisfaction. This makes them different from the atheist who has a perfectly acceptable answer.

I’ve come to find it interesting - a lot of folks in America have a very hard time understanding the difference between “I wish I knew” and “I don’t claim perfect certainty, but I don’t believe, and, honestly, just don’t care” when it comes to existence of a deity.

In short: the material manifestation of ‘bread’ is simply an instance of the ideal concept of Bread which is eternal and exists in a realm of pure idea (just like every triangle in the world is just a pale imperfect copy of the idea of Triangle, which is perfect as it is a pure abstract geometric form). Breadness is an essential characteristic of physical bread. Transubstiation replaces Breadness with Christness, even if to our stupid philosophical materialist eyes it still looks, tastes, smells and has the chemical composition and burns for the exact same amount of joules as bread.

I believe that would be that Transubtiation replaces Bread with Christ, while the Breadness that was associated with the Bread just keeps on going.

And if you ask how that can be, well, because that’s why.

Actually, based on what I think is a huge whopping gap, I’d like to pin a Jesuit down and ask “why”?

SJ: What?
PiaToR: Why does it look like bread?
SJ: Because it retains the accidents of bread, while having the substance of Christ.
PiaToR: So God wants people to suspect it’s bullshit?
SJ: What?
PiaTor: Because you claim he’s changing the substance of the bread.  So why not the accidents as well?  Why does He leave the accidents the same?
SJ: I - He has his ways.
PiaToR: Either the entire Eucharist stuff is bullshit, or God is deliberately screwing with you to encourage doubt.

As an atheist, I refuse to shoulder the burden of disproving the thousands of historical definitions of “god” much less the ones created five minutes from now.

Instead, I merely point to the reasonableness of doubt, the comfort of an end to human suffering, and the richness of philosophical materialism.

And of COURSE I’m making it up as I go along.  We all are.

Some of us apparently just do it a whole fuckload more than others. <eyeroll>

Look, the comment in question clearly stated that it is weird, and nonsensical, to *say a prayer to a god you don’t believe in* while claiming to be part of a religion that demands a belief in a deity (and then demanding on the Internet that everyone consider YOU, but not some other dude you don’t like, representative of said religion). Which is a lot of what is going on here. “X church teaches Y dogma, but I’m part of X church and I don’t believe Y dogma, or like 99% of other things the church teaches, so why would you listen to all those other X church people and not ME? Clearly I’M the real X-churcher.”

That has nothing to do with an overarching existential uncertainty, or refusing to change in the face of experience and fact.

And, Well, what?, to build on that, but to return to the original point, it doesn’t matter whether it was made up centuries ago or whether you’r building on it or making it up now.  What matters is if it’s *true* or not.  At least, to me.

Atheism is the state of not believing in a deity. One can be an atheist without making a positive claim (“there is no god or gods”).

But I’m not saying “there are no people with three functioning arms”.

It might be more along the lines of “Am I adopted, with my supposed parents sworn never to reveal the truth?”  It’s possible - and, unlike your example, it actively works against testing the hypothesis (excluding screwing around with genetic tests and the like).

There is a possibility of a God who leaves it open to doubt, deliberately designing the universe to not require Itself as an explanation.  Do I believe or not believe in such a God - do I think such a God is more or less unlikely than not such a God?  No evidence, since by definition, there can’t be any evidence either way.

Of course, that sort of God precludes any revealed religion or interference in human life and is of no consequence to my actions.  Thus I consider myself “agnostic” while being functionally atheist.

@Comment #139: doubtthat

I never claimed that communist atrocities were the responsibility of atheism.  I claimed only that they were examples of mass murder that did not depend on religious belief.  I thought you were arguing that certain kinds of evil acts could only be perpetrated based on religious beliefs.  What you’re actually arguing is that there are some *motivations* for atrocities that specifically depend on religion, like anti-Jewish pogroms.  That is true.  Without religion, no one would ever kill anyone else based on religious prejudice.  Whether that means the sum total of evil acts in the world would be any less is unknowable.  Given that people seem equally willing to kill each other in the service of nationalism, tribalism, racism, and political ideology, I wouldn’t be optimistic. 

And since you don’t know what my religious beliefs are, you can save your condescending comments. 

Perhaps the Catholic Church no longer condemns suicides to eternal damnation, although what I read above about current theology seems to be both splitting hairs and obfuscating.

However, that damaging theology existed long enough that devout Catholics believe it still to be so.

A myth that caused pain in the past, and still does so. Very real pain in very real people.

That’s the point: religion may supply comfort, but those religious myths can and do cause real pain in the here and now.

Tangentially (and I apologize if I’m making a point already noted above), but I also enjoyed the wingnut Christians’ total failure to note the irony in laughing at the “ridiculous” notion that the 9/11 hijackers would ascend into heaven and be rewarded with 72 virgins (“What a bunch of cuh-razy bullshit…hahaha!”) while in the very next breathe taking comfort in the knowledge that the victims were now “with God.”  Talk about having it both ways. 

Has there ever been a clearer example of the folly of religious superstition than that?

@#149 Kit-Kat:

It’s pretty convenient that the argument you thought I was making turned out to be really, really shitty.  I argued that without religion, no one would be shaming the 9-11 leapers.  You would break that down into a religious motivation (suicide is a sin) and and act (shaming).  That’s an odd understanding of an event, unless you’re of the opinion that removing the motivation for the act wouldn’t stop the act from occurring.

Without religion no one would be killing people for disrespecting crackers.  You read that as an assertion that without religion no one would ever kill anyone again?  That seems like a convenient strawman to harangue.

And you’re welcome to express your non-ridiculous religious beliefs, but my guess is that if they rely on superstition, the supernatural, and belief without evidence, I’ll be more than able to continue condescending.

Wrong—some people make up religious beliefs that are peculiar to them.

And?  This doesn’t alter the definition of the word “religion”, nor does it in any way defeat the overall point - that religions require belief in bollocks that can, and does, cause harm. It also does nothing to remove the No True Scotsman: if someone who worships Thor calls himself a Christian, he clearly isn’t.  If someone like Fred Phelps calls himself a Christian, because he worships Jesus, reads the bible and doesn’t cherry-pick, he is a Christian, regardless of how much other Christians may not want him to be.

Also wrong. That’s certainly one very flawed definition. There’s a great deal of scholarship on this particular issue, and I suggest you read it.

Yes, those damn dictionaries not agreeing with the “great deal” of scholarship not listed or specified.  I second the request for some specific titles, so I can see if I actually haven’t read it, or if I just don’t agree with your interpretation.

You will FREQUENTLY read Amanda saying that no “real” atheist could be anti-choice because it requires magical religious thinking. And YOU just said that NO atheist would deny another’s atheism based on other than god-belief principles—yet now you are linking atheism not just with a disbelief in God, but in a particular belief in what other atheists think.

Just so we’re clear: Holding an anti-choice argument that requires magical religious thinking, precludes one from being an atheist as magical religious thinking is sort of the antithesis of atheism . . . and this proves no true scotsman applies . . . lol wow.
I guess I’m going to have to ask Amanda to weigh in here.  Amanda, is this what you actually say or is this a convenient rewrite? Or, more specifically, is there nuance being deliberately erased and ignored in favor of “NUH-UH!!”

My comments were limited to whether the Hell-suicide belief (falsely) attributed to the Hernandez family by Amanda was shared by large segments of the religious population.

Ah, my mistake.  Let me amend: You will however hear, as we have heard theists claim, that people who believe in the same god as said theist aren’t REAL believers - like they are, evidently - because, even though they believe in the same god, they do it slightly different.
This happens with some regularity, I hear, on strictly atheist blogs.(That is, not feminist blogs).

++

This is a standard agnostic position. There may be SOME gods that can be disproven because their very definition contains some logical contradiction, but you could certainly construct some definition of God that is consistent. And you couldn’t disprove it exists one way or the other, any way you can prove or disproof that life on other planets exists.

And are you saying we can’t prove or disprove that life exists elsewhere or is there a typo in there I’m confused by?

Would you agree that at some point it becomes illogical to believe that something exists?  I.e.Someone convinced there is a diamond the size of a fridge buried in their backyard spends 5 years digging around looking for it. As they will, naturally, not find it, is there a point that it becomes ridiculous to keep believing its there, regardless of the inability to 100% disprove that it isn’t?

As for the rest of Kit Kat’s thoughts, they’re perfectly reasonable.

And here “perfectly reasonable” is redefined to mean speculation and assumption based on . . . . guesses, apparently.

Wrong—some people make up religious beliefs that are peculiar to them.

And?  This doesn’t alter the definition of the word “religion”, nor does it in any way defeat the overall point - that religions require belief in bollocks that can, and does, cause harm. It also does nothing to remove the No True Scotsman: if someone who worships Thor calls himself a Christian, he clearly isn’t.  If someone like Fred Phelps calls himself a Christian, because he worships Jesus, reads the bible and doesn’t cherry-pick, he is a Christian, regardless of how much other Christians may not want him to be.

Also wrong. That’s certainly one very flawed definition. There’s a great deal of scholarship on this particular issue, and I suggest you read it.

Yes, those damn dictionaries not agreeing with the “great deal” of scholarship not listed or specified.  I second the request for some specific titles, so I can see if I actually haven’t read it, or if I just don’t agree with your interpretation.

You will FREQUENTLY read Amanda saying that no “real” atheist could be anti-choice because it requires magical religious thinking. And YOU just said that NO atheist would deny another’s atheism based on other than god-belief principles—yet now you are linking atheism not just with a disbelief in God, but in a particular belief in what other atheists think.

Just so we’re clear: Holding an anti-choice argument that requires magical religious thinking, precludes one from being an atheist as magical religious thinking is sort of the antithesis of atheism . . . and this proves no true scotsman applies . . . lol wow.

I guess I’m going to have to ask Amanda to weigh in here.  Amanda, is this what you actually say or is this a convenient rewrite? Or, more specifically, is there nuance being deliberately erased and ignored in favor of “NUH-UH!!”

My comments were limited to whether the Hell-suicide belief (falsely) attributed to the Hernandez family by Amanda was shared by large segments of the religious population.

Ah, my mistake.  Let me amend: You will however hear, as we have heard theists claim, that people who believe in the same god as said theist aren’t REAL believers - like they are, evidently - because, even though they believe in the same god, they do it slightly different.
This happens with some regularity, I hear, on strictly atheist blogs.(That is, not feminist blogs).

++

This is a standard agnostic position. There may be SOME gods that can be disproven because their very definition contains some logical contradiction, but you could certainly construct some definition of God that is consistent. And you couldn’t disprove it exists one way or the other, any way you can prove or disproof that life on other planets exists.

And are you saying we can’t prove or disprove that life exists elsewhere or is there a typo in there I’m confused by?

Would you agree that at some point it becomes illogical to believe that something exists?  I.e. Someone convinced there is a diamond the size of a fridge buried in their backyard spends 5 years digging around looking for it. As they will, naturally, not find it, is there a point that it becomes ridiculous to keep believing its there, regardless of the inability to 100% disprove that it isn’t?

As for the rest of Kit Kat’s thoughts, they’re perfectly reasonable.

And here “perfectly reasonable” is redefined to mean speculation and assumption based on . . . . guesses, apparently.

WHoops sorry for double post - don’t know what happened there.

It was so pleasing to the Lord, Jesus commanded the internets to let us read it twice.  Truly a miracle hath occurred!

“Look, the comment in question clearly stated that it is weird, and nonsensical, to *say a prayer to a god you don’t believe in* while claiming to be part of a religion that demands a belief in a deity (and then demanding on the Internet that everyone consider YOU, but not some other dude you don’t like, representative of said religion). Which is a lot of what is going on here. “X church teaches Y dogma, but I’m part of X church and I don’t believe Y dogma, or like 99% of other things the church teaches, so why would you listen to all those other X church people and not ME? Clearly I’M the real X-churcher.”

I didn’t write that comment and I wasn’t responding to it in particular, merely to the general criticism that religions or religious people are making it up as they go along.  I’m also not going to say who’s a “real” Methodist or Catholic or Jew or whatever.  Yes, if you say grace and you don’t believe in god, that’s kind of silly.  But the original comment was about saying grace and not believing that the Bible is the inerrant word of god, and there’s nothing silly about that.  Yes, people pick and choose what they accept from a given religion, and I don’t see how that is a criticism of religion or religious people.  People may believe X and Y, but find Z to be incredible (i.e., I believe in a God, but I can’t accept that he turns into a wafer), or contradictory to X, or morally abhorrent, or whatever, and therefore refuse to believe Z.  Or they might believe Z, but then something happens that makes Z an untenable belief, so they jettison it.  That doesn’t make them hypocrites. 

Rare, I’m not comfortable saying that atheists cannot be anti-choice because I really do take the definition to literally mean someone who doesn’t believe in gods.  There are loads of atheists who believe lots of irrational things without necessarily attributing anything supernatural to it, and I’m sure that a wooey pseudoscience-believing person who doesn’t believe in a deity can find an excuse to treat women like they are less than human without turning to Jesus to do it.  There are loads of irrational atheists.

@Comment #152: doubtthat

Because it couldn’t possibly be that you expressed yourself imprecisely in your original post?  I mean, I admitted that I misunderstood you, and you’re still being a jackass about it?

Or, perhaps for a finer point, there’s a difference between skeptics and atheists.  Skeptics are, in my opinion, atheists by necessity, but atheists need not be skeptics because there are any number of reasons not to believe in a deity and some of them are less logic-based than others.

I’m sure that a wooey pseudosciene-believing person who doesn’t believe in a deity can find an excuse to treat women like they are less than human without turning to Jesus to do it.

Richard Dawkins manages it without any wooeyness at all.

Kit-Kat, still no word on your strawman that people are religious because they need wonder in their lives, implying that atheists have none.  I am hoping it’s because you’re waiting to take ten very productive and fulfilling moments to watch the Tyson clip that I posted.

I’m referring more specifically to being anti-choice, Johnny Pez, but well-played.  I think it’s more because he has a lack of information, specifically, the information on what it is like to be female.  Not that he hasn’t been offered.

I’m not sure what it is that I’ve been speculating and assuming about, since I am not, nor have I ever, advanced an argument here for the existence of God.  I was trying to make the point (poorly, apparently) that the mere belief in the non-rational is not, in and of itself, woo or superstition or whatever.  It’s the result of a fundamental impulse that many people have in the face of mystery.  Even if science explains how absolutely everything in the universe works, there would, I think, still be something about the world that inspires awe in some people.  You can experience that awe without believing in God, clearly, but to say that the leap from that awe to a feeling that there is something that we call “god” is mere “woo” is to undeservedly denigrate it.  That’s all I was trying to say.

@Comment #152: Kit-Kat

Look, fair enough, misunderstandings happen.  Here was my post that started this:

Again, necessary vs. sufficient.  Bad acts can be done by the religious and non-religious, alike, but there is a unique set of evil singular to religion.  Religion is required to convince people to carve up their daughters’ genitals, for example.

I think that’s fairly clear and your response asserted very much the opposite of that and turned it into an insane, incoherent stance.  I wrongly assumed this was intentional, so my apologies.

“Kit-Kat, still no word on your strawman that people are religious because they need wonder in their lives, implying that atheists have none.  I am hoping it’s because you’re waiting to take ten very productive and fulfilling moments to watch the Tyson clip that I posted.”

Um, because that’s not the argument I made.  I was trying to say that some people are religious because they experience wonder in their lives, and that wonder is not just irrational woo.  You can experience that wonder without being religious, so it’s not an explanation or an argument for religious belief.  I also clearly said that I did not mean that atheists can’t experience wonder, so who’s got a strawman?

Thanks, INTPagan.  I can’t think of anyone specific, but I have no doubt there are thoroughly non-woo atheists who have what they consider to be perfectly rational reasons to be anti-choice.  The evo-psychs seem like a good possibility in that regard.

It was so pleasing to the Lord, Jesus commanded the internets to let us read it twice.  Truly a miracle hath occurred!

And if Vos had said that Fred Phelps was a Chirstian in the first post and was not a Christian in the second post, they would both be true, because it is Scripture, and inerrant, and never ever contains contradictions.  Just ask Joseph’s father Jacob Heli

You can experience that awe without believing in God, clearly, but to say that the leap from that awe to a feeling that there is something that we call “god” is mere “woo” is to undeservedly denigrate it.

What’s that line? Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it?

I don’t see what is so special about the fact that some people need to stick a face on phenomena they don’t/can’t perceive or understand. I also don’t see how it’s not woo. The reason can’t be “billions of people have done it.” Billions of people do lots of random stuff that we don’t really consider sanctified in any way.

@Comment #164: Kit-Kat:

If religious people stopped there, I doubt there would be much of an argument between the religious and non-religious.  It’s the steps following that “sense of awe” that generate the debate. 

If all you want to say is that you feel something that is inadequately described by science, fine.  I might disagree, and if we just want to have a philosophical argument, take the position that the belief predated the awe, but it will be a frivolous discussion.

It’s when people say, “I feel a sense of awe that is inadequately described by science, that’s God, and, ohbytheway, He says you need to toss on a burka and go make me a sandwich.  He was also all, ‘fuck no, brah, you didn’t come from no monkey’” that the problems start.

I’m not accusing you of taking those next steps, but obviously most of the world is eager to sprint right along, using poorly founded beliefs to justify all manner of acts, like tossing shame on the memories of people who jumped from the towers on 9-11.

Kit-Kat, I made it clear that the experience of wonder is not an excuse for irrational or unfalsifiable beliefs since they are not required in order to fulfill that sense of wonder.  Your reply is, “But it is, because I say that the explanations that we have just aren’t pretty enough, and can’t possibly be.”  Um.  yeah.

@Comment #165: doubtthat:

I read “unique set of evil,” followed by the example of pogroms against Jews, to refer to mass murder (i.e., particular acts), rather than mass murder for a particular reason.  I totally agree that anti-Semitism was originally a religious phenomenon (although it took on a rather ugly pseudo-sciencey life of its own).  (I would recommend *Constantine’s Sword,* which holds no punches in condemning the Church on this point.)

I was not intentionally trying to misunderstand you.  I really have heard people argue the position I thought you were advancing.

“Kit-Kat, I made it clear that the experience of wonder is not an excuse for irrational or unfalsifiable beliefs since they are not required in order to fulfill that sense of wonder.  Your reply is, “But it is, because I say that the explanations that we have just aren’t pretty enough, and can’t possibly be.”  Um.  yeah.”

No,  I didn’t say that.  I said that whether religious belief is “required” to fulfill that sense of wonder, it is not irrational that religious belief is the response.  It is obvious to me that religious belief is not necessary, because many atheists experience the one and not the other. 

Saying that there is no god is not an unfalsifiable position. In fact, for an omnipotent deity its falsification would be trivially easy.

Post 68 proves that any discussion will eventually end up at Godwin’s door.

Hertta: Saying that there is no god is not an unfalsifiable position. In fact, for an omnipotent deity its falsification would be trivially easy.

Quite. Also, we would all have Babel Fish.

Well, let’s say then that the existence of god is a position which is unfalsifiable by humans. 

Although Babelfish would be awesome.

No, it’s not. We could find evidence of a deity that would falsify the position.

Kit-Kat, you can’t demonstrate why religious belief is not an irrational response other than saying, “No, it’s not.”  We have science.  We also have the reasoning capabilities to rule out unicorns and deities other than the ones that we were taught about growing up (unless the person in question, like I did, accepts that as a serious possibility, although I later rejected it all).  Why is it not irrational for them to accept unfalsifiable premises that are deities or supernatural entities but not to reject unicorns?  Would you think that someone who thought that unicorns had something to do with the deeper purpose of the universe and so believed in them was irrational?  I can’t prove that they don’t exist.  Someone who takes Sagan’s fire-breathing dragon seriously would be called crazy by most people, but someone who believes in an invisible being, regardless of its relative involvement with the universe, is not viewed as crazy so long as there is sufficient historical backing of that belief.  (I don’t think that religious people are mentally ill, for the record, because they are engaging in herd behaviour, which is a strong tendency with people.)  Why are deities exempt, aside from that you want them to be?

The existence of a deity about which specific physical claims are made is falsifiable.  The claim that the universe was created by/is inhabited by/is a manifestation of a greater force that is love/learning/a giant supercomputer meant to discern the meaning of life is not (at least, not from where we are).  The problem with this whole conversation is, define God.  Either people are willing to define God, at which point they are generally proven wrong, or they continue to move the goalposts until the meaning of “God” is sufficiently meaningless to result in a universe that might as well have no deity.  Either way, sorry, no dice to the God thing.

I regard the “religion provides comfort” claim on the same plane as “religion makes people act better”.  Assuming both those claims are true you’re only making the case for religion’s ability to control behavior, not proving the validity of the belief itself.

But we can’t rule out creation by a deity.  Honestly, we just can’t.  Even science can only take us back to the Big Bang but can’t explain how or why matter came to exist in the first place.  At that point, we’re all guessing.  There’s no evidence either way.  It’s something we can’t know and yet we, as a species, wonder about it.  There’s a reason, I think, that all cultures have creation myths.  Because it’s unknowable—we can’t witness the process—believing that there is a being who created the world is no more or less rational than believing there wasn’t.  We’re all in the dark on that one, I think. 

Frankly, I think the true mark of religious belief as I experience it (which is not universal, although not unique to me) is humility.  You realize that you know so little about the universe and your place in it.  You accept that we live with doubt and fear and uncertainty.  You learn not to be so sure that you are right. 

Like I said, not universal.  People so often want certainty, want black-and-white answers, and religion can do that, too.  But not for me. 

We can’t rule out creation of the universe by me, either.  I don’t think that’s a good foundation for belief.

And still saying that there is no creator would not be unfalsifiable. Unless you define your deity as something that can never be detected by any means. In which case it would do nothing.

Perhaps science will never give you satisfactory answers to all your whys, but that’s not a good reason to believe that a deity exists.

“You realize that you know so little about the universe and your place in it.  You accept that we live with doubt and fear and uncertainty.  You learn not to be so sure that you are right.”

And believing in a god follows from that how?

But we can’t rule out creation by a deity.  Honestly, we just can’t.

Of course not.  You can’t prove a negative.

“Creator — A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.”

“I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind — that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.”

H. L. Mencken

The problem with this whole conversation is, define God.  Either people are willing to define God, at which point they are generally proven wrong, or they continue to move the goalposts until the meaning of “God” is sufficiently meaningless to result in a universe that might as well have no deity. 

That pretty much sums up every objection I have to debating with believers.

I think the true mark of religious belief as I experience it (which is not universal, although not unique to me) is humility.  You realize that you know so little about the universe and your place in it.  You accept that we live with doubt and fear and uncertainty.  You learn not to be so sure that you are right. 

But you don’t have the humility to give the god hypothesis the weight it actually deserves in the existence question. You favor the hypothesis with the least evidence supporting it because it happens to be the one you like. Even if you won’t claim absolute belief, you still aren’t dealing honestly with the uncertainty. You have more humility than the believer who claims absolute belief, but you don’t have anywhere near enough to lecture anyone else about it.

Comment #47: Phoenician in a time of Romans on 09/13 at 10:24 AM

2282 and 2283 would seem to indicate that the Church’s actual ,oral poistion on the 911 jumpers would be that they shouldn’t have done it, but their responsibility for their actions was gravely diminisihed by their circumstances (and, by extension, the reponsibility lies on Al Qaeda), and it’s up to God to figure it out.

Focusing on just this may be a case of missing the forest for the trees; there are other moral principles that must be considered and that may make the narrow things that you cite inapplicable.

I just went out looking for Catholic analyses of the 9/11 jumps, and found a few examples; for example, I’ve seen some that cite the principle of double effect.  Example application: the people who jumped from the building intended to escape from intense heat that no person can tolerate, which is a morally justifiable end; they may have “foreseen” their deaths but did not intend them, because they would have preferred any alternative that did not cost them their lives.

People make similar errors when talking about secular law, too.  The law says you can’t steal, and you can look up the exact part of the law that says so, but the criminal code also defines elsewhere a set of elements that make up a crime (mens rea and actus reus), and lists general defenses that excuse people from an act that would otherwise be criminal.  A charge of stealing bread the day after Hurricane Katrina can be answered by the defense of necessity.

There are an infinite number of possible phenomena that can’t be “ruled out” because they are unfalsifiable.  That’s not a compelling argument to believe in any of them.

@Comment #188: sacundim on 09/13 at 06:49 PM

I just went out looking for Catholic analyses of the 9/11 jumps, and found a few examples; for example, I’ve seen some that cite the principle of double effect.  Example application: the people who jumped from the building intended to escape from intense heat that no person can tolerate, which is a morally justifiable end; they may have “foreseen” their deaths but did not intend them, because they would have preferred any alternative that did not cost them their lives.

Sure, but you can also find plenty of examples of the modern-day Catholic church sticking to the letter of their laws despite the utter inhumanity that this leads to. So it is certainly good that Catholics can be reasonable people, which no-one doubted. But the fact is that in order to be reasonable, they have to consciously decide to bend their own incredibly harsh religious laws. Seems to me it is a sense of realpolitik that leads them to do this, not anything inherent in their code.

Kit-Kat, if you can’t tell me the difference between the universe with whatever nebulous thing you may or may not believe in and the universe without it, then why are you paying lip service to the idea that it might be there?  If it’s irrelevant then it doesn’t matter whether it exists or not, and there is no reason to pretend as if it might.  By all evidence thus far, it doesn’t.  Sure, I don’t know if a God or an alien force or a supercomputer or Astral Isaac Newton set the Big Bang rolling, but what difference does it make?  This is pure semantics.  I don’t see why it would be comforting or particularly important to have the “humility” that it takes to hem and haw over the probability of the existence of something that has either never shown its face or is so ambiguously defined as to be irrelevant.  That’s why I’m an atheist.  I’m not super hardcore positive that there’s no God.  I just think that it’s irrational to behave as if there is evidence for one, or to make excuses and pretend as if there’s something that we just can’t have contact with when, by definition, it’s irrelevant anyway.

I regard the “religion provides comfort” claim on the same plane as “religion makes people act better”.  Assuming both those claims are true you’re only making the case for religion’s ability to control behavior, not proving the validity of the belief itself.

Exactly!  My question isn’t, “Is it nice?”  My question is, “Is it true?”  That is the most important thing in the universe to me.

There are an infinite number of possible phenomena that can’t be “ruled out” because they are unfalsifiable.  That’s not a compelling argument to believe in any of them.

Which part of “agnostic” do you think involves believing in God, Johnny?

And still saying that there is no creator would not be unfalsifiable.

“There is no Creator, where “Creator” is defined as an omnipotent being who refuses to give evidence of Its existence”.

Now how exactly is that unfalsifiable?  If you find evidence of a diety, either it isn’t omnipotent, or it wanted to be found - so it can’t be this Creator.

Comment #187: junk science—

I’m not lecturing anyone.  I usually don’t discuss what I believe with anyone other than very close friends for that reason.  I’m not trying to persuade anyone, I admit that I’m bouncing around in the dark.  But here there was a discussion going on that seemed relevant.  I won’t make that mistake again—it’s not a subject that lends itself to internet discussion, frankly.

Comment #152: doubtthat on 09/13 at 05:01 PM

I argued that without religion, no one would be shaming the 9-11 leapers.

I think this is a bridge too far.  Any connection that I can think of between (ir)religiosity and jumper-shaming is contingent; you could imagine folks who did not believe in God but whose culture otherwise led them to shame the leapers.

I also think that some people here are being very selective about how they portray the Hernández family case.  Junod’s article on the Falling Man recounts his interview with the Hernández family, and it mentions but doesn’t stress the “hell” motive.  Rather, the emphasis is in the idea that jumping would have been a “betrayal of love”:

But he couldn’t have jumped out a window, his family knows, because he wouldn’t have jumped out a window: not Papi. “He was trying to come home,” Catherine says one morning, in a living room primarily decorated with framed photographs of her father. “He was trying to come home to us, and he knew he wasn’t going to make it by jumping out a window.”

[...]

“My mother says she knows that when he died, he was thinking about us. She says that she could see him thinking about us. I know that sounds strange, but she knew him. They were together since they were fifteen.” The Norberto Hernandez Eulogia knew would not have been deterred by smoke or by fire in his effort to come home to her. The Norberto Hernandez she knew would have endured any pain before he jumped out of a window. When the Norberto Hernandez she knew died, his eyes were fixed on what he saw in his heart—the faces of his wife and his daughters—and not on the terrible beauty of an empty sky.

This doesn’t sound like an unequivocally religious fear.  I don’t mean to deny that religious may have been an influence here—but I could see non-religious people who are very attached to their partner reacting similarly.

I just went out looking for Catholic analyses of the 9/11 jumps, and found a few examples; for example, I’ve seen some that cite the principle of double effect.  Example application: the people who jumped from the building intended to escape from intense heat that no person can tolerate, which is a morally justifiable end; they may have “foreseen” their deaths but did not intend them, because they would have preferred any alternative that did not cost them their lives.

Alas, the Catholic Encyclopaedia (representing thinking up to the 1900s or so) discusses this. It would be classified as positive indirect suicide (i.e. they killed themselevs but didn’t want to). This may be good when done for “sufficient reason” (such as tending to the infectious sick); but I’m pretty sure avoiding pain doesn’t count - euthanasia is still a sin.

From what I read on this discussion, faced with a situation of burning to death or running to avoid death, it is suicide not to run.  Faced with a situation where you can’t avoid death, the positive action of stepping off the ledge makes jumping suicide but staying to get burned not suicide.  *Technically* God put you in this situation and has the right to kill you, but you don’t have the right to kill yourself.

However, I repeat - the Catechism states that it’s up to God to decide about eternal salvation. Faced with the alternative of dying in agony, “offending against God” by dying a few seconds sooner cleanly is about as far as a human can conceive as an excuse for the “sin”.

Plus if you honestly thought there was even the slightest remote chance you might survive, you’d have a duty to jump.  I would make one of my usual flippant comments here, but the subject matter is just too damned tragic to trivialize.

Wondering about the origin of religious edicts against suicide, maybe part of it is that killing yourself is the ultimate statement of shoving your deity’s earthly creation back in its face. Reject the precious gift of life? Go to hell.

When I was a young teenager, my best friend made several suicide attempts.  After the first one, her parents punished her by docking her allowance (!) and telling her exactly this.  It didn’t work, insofar as she made quite a few attempts after that.  So yes, people believe this, and it does cause pain and prevent them from getting the help they need.

The Nazis didn’t need religion to kill more Jews than had been killed all the centuries of religious persecution.

The Nazis killed the Jews as a form of religious persecution, and would not have been able to do so without hundreds and hundreds of years of Christian antisemitism.  As has been pointed out.

Had she died of cancer, everyone would have been sad, but no one would have wondered what they could have done to prevent it.  If she had died in a car accident, no one would have felt blame for what had happened.  If she had been murdered, her children would not have felt that she abandoned them.  Cancer has no intent; suicide does.

You underestimate the lengths to which people will go in order to blame themselves and/or the victim in order to make themselves feel better.  In particular, with respect to suicide, this kind of self-blame/blame of the victim reflects ignorance about how and why people commit suicide.  It’s an argument for less stigma and greater understanding, not more stigma.

But we can’t rule out creation by a deity.

We can, actually, if we’re looking for first causes.  Say some god caused the big bang—that only leads to the question of where that god came from, thus moving the creation question back one degree. 

Comment #190: atheist on 09/13 at 07:01 PM

Sure, but you can also find plenty of examples of the modern-day Catholic church sticking to the letter of their laws despite the utter inhumanity that this leads to. So it is certainly good that Catholics can be reasonable people, which no-one doubted.  But the fact is that in order to be reasonable, they have to consciously decide to bend their own incredibly harsh religious laws. Seems to me it is a sense of realpolitik that leads them to do this, not anything inherent in their code.

I’m no fan of the Catholic Church, but I think your characterization of them “bending” their laws in these cases is backwards; this is what I would insist is a correct application.  Their laws are applied in careful and nuanced “big-picture” fashion when the accused elicits their sympathy, but summarily, over-literally and crudely when they dislike the accused.

Comment #180: DonnaDiva on 09/13 at 06:15 PM

I regard the “religion provides comfort” claim on the same plane as “religion makes people act better”.  Assuming both those claims are true you’re only making the case for religion’s ability to control behavior, not proving the validity of the belief itself.

I don’t, because I think the first is true and the second false.  Also, I don’t see what link you mean between providing comfort and controlling behavior; can’t people receive comfort that exercises little control over their behavior?

I’m going to make a bit of a leap here, and correct me if I’m wrong: you sound like you’d endorse the argument that we should dissuade people from false beliefs even if those beliefs actually improve their behavior or provide them comfort.  Or more generally, that Truth trumps Good—a common unstated premise among atheists.

Yes, people pick and choose what they accept from a given religion, and I don’t see how that is a criticism of religion or religious people.  People may believe X and Y, but find Z to be incredible (i.e., I believe in a God, but I can’t accept that he turns into a wafer), or contradictory to X, or morally abhorrent, or whatever, and therefore refuse to believe Z.  Or they might believe Z, but then something happens that makes Z an untenable belief, so they jettison it.  That doesn’t make them hypocrites.

It makes them looks stupid, in any case. There is no evidence, whatsoever, in the real physical universe that would suggest the existence of God. People (today, at least) read a book and decided that this Christian God guy really exists, but then they say they don’t accept whatever random stuff in the bible is too abhorrent to admit out loud. That’s cherry picking. Why on earth would you accept the huge, unjustifiable claim that there is a God, but then not accept all the stuff written in the same book that goes along with that belief? Fred Phelps may be a loathesome dick, but he is a consistent and honest one. He’s at least following the bible as it is actually written.

It would be like reading The Lord of the Rings and decideing that Gandalf exists, and that wizards have magical powers, but that all that stuff about elves and dragons was clearly nuts. You can’t have one without the other.

I think anyone who thinks it was suicide is silly. The heat of the building instinctively would make people jump. Simply barbaric death. Something in religious news that quite creeped me out, was this. Some douche is actually trying to use our secular court system to support his personal (and regressive) religious beliefs and laws.

http://denver.cbslocal.com/2011/09/12/denver-appellate-court-to-hear-islamic-law-case-2/

I dont think even Christians have had the gravitas to try and instill Biblical law in our court system. One law for all, no religious excemptions. Its also a nice way to fuck over women/homosexuals. Liberals need to get more aggressive about confronting Islam. They act worse than Christians. I never read anything against their behavior by liberals.

But we can’t rule out creation by a deity.  Honestly, we just can’t.  Even science can only take us back to the Big Bang but can’t explain how or why matter came to exist in the first place.  At that point, we’re all guessing.  There’s no evidence either way.  It’s something we can’t know and yet we, as a species, wonder about it.  There’s a reason, I think, that all cultures have creation myths.  Because it’s unknowable—we can’t witness the process—believing that there is a being who created the world is no more or less rational than believing there wasn’t.  We’re all in the dark on that one, I think.

I wish people would stop equating “equally unknowable” with “equally probable”. The answers god and not god are not remotely on the same ground of likelihood.

Which is the more sound conclusion about the beginning of the universe?

A)it came about through natural processes governed by natural laws, just like everything else we’ve ever experienced (even if we don’t fully understand those processes yet)

or

B) A god (“I don’t know…God. The God…yes I just made that up, but what’s your point?”) that has never been observed, experienced, or even defined, that exists and operates ouside the bounds of time, space, or materiality (“because I say so”) did it.

The two aren’t even close. It’s not a fifty-fifty proposition. All the evidence is weighted on one side. I would hope you could see which one.

I wish people would stop equating “equally unknowable” with “equally probable”. The answers god and not god are not remotely on the same ground of likelihood.

And what, pray tell, is your sample range for that assertion on probability?

A)it came about through natural processes governed by natural laws, just like everything else we’ve ever experienced (even if we don’t fully understand those processes yet)

Everything you’ve experienced has been inside a universe.  On what basis do you assume that these observations are relevant to the universe as a whole?

Sorry, Amanda, but from where I sit, you’re just doubling down on a very bad idea.

In the post that started all this, you said:

When I first read about how the choice to jump instead of stay in the WTC to burn to death became stigmatized, I didn’t understand it at all. Why were people judging one choice over another in a choice-free situation?

You were challenged to say just who was doing the stigmatizing and judging, and you responded with a lot of defensive hand-waving and a link to something about a grief-stricken daughter who said “they” told her her father was going to hell. That’s a very thin pillar to support a heavy load of bile.

I always thought religions stigmatize suicide not because its “natural” to stigmatize suicide, but because if you’re going to go around talking about how great heaven is and how much better everything will be in the afterlife, then you also have to put something in place to prevent everyone from wanting to go to the afterlife right now. The religions that didn’t do that didn’t survive, because their members all decided to kill themselves to go to heaven right away. (Think of certain cults.)

Just like how the religions that said no one should ever have sex didn’t survive either. Its a selectional thing. Think about it. If you honestly believe in heaven, and you didn’t believe suicide was a sin, why would you not kill yourself and go to heaven right away?

#205 geogami,
I remember a tv talk show in which an atheist debated religious people and they had (I think) a Baptist on and he said something along the lines of ‘we think abortion is wrong because they die unnaturally,’ then the atheist said ‘so that means theyre sent to heaven quicker?’ LOL!

I wish people would stop equating “equally unknowable” with “equally probable”. The answers god and not god are not remotely on the same ground of likelihood.

And what, pray tell, is your sample range for that assertion on probability?

Ummm…the entire fucking history of the known universe?

Everything you’ve experienced has been inside a universe.  On what basis do you assume that these observations are relevant to the universe as a whole?

Where, exactly, is “outside the universe”? Also, please explain how a being that exists outside the bounds of the physical reality of the entire universe interacts with it. Also, why the fuck should I believe anyone who says they know anything about a being that exists outside the bounds of the physical realityof the entire universe, much less that there is something (someone, even!) there in the first place?

A few years ago, I fell into a deep depression and attempted suicide by taking all my anti-depressants (shows just how much the anti-depressants helped my depression).  I subsequently threw them up after not being able to keep them down and “I shit, what the hell, I’ll call 911.”

During the ambulance ride to the hospital, one of the paramedics asked me if I went to church. I told him I haven’t been in years. He replied, “Well that’s the problem.” He then went on to inform me that I would go to hell if I killed myself. Now here I was, with an intravenous needle in my arm, all shaky from taking so many pills and he’s threatening me with hell? I decided from that moment on I would never step inside a church outside of attending weddings or funerals again.  And I kept that promise too.

Interestingly, I had avoided telling my mother I was suicidal because the last time I did, she had no compassion telling me nonchalantly that “You’ll go to hell.”  I used to be a Christan before my nervous breakdown. Normally, people turn toward religion in the midst of a serious illness. Well, I encountered so much bullshit from religious people marginalizing me for my illness that

I left Christianity all together and will not be going back. It’s awful that people use what’s supposed to make them into more compassionate people and turn it into a weapon to further humiliate and stigmatize those who are already in pain and that makes me furious.

I’m going to make a bit of a leap here, and correct me if I’m wrong: you sound like you’d endorse the argument that we should dissuade people from false beliefs even if those beliefs actually improve their behavior or provide them comfort.  Or more generally, that Truth trumps Good—a common unstated premise among atheists.

I’m endorsing the argument that the belief in Santa Claus may make little kids behave better around Christmastime but that doesn’t mean that Santa exists.  Those who argue that false beliefs are good if they produce a good affect on other people’s behavior or comfort level are treating their fellow adult humans like they are parents lying to their kids about the Tooth Fairy or Santa.  In the case of parents and little kids, it’s benign since the kids will grow out of it.  In your case it’s dishonest and disrespectful. 

BTW, the level of atheism in a country correlates with low homicide rates, low infant mortality, educational attainment, and gender equality.  http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=pzuckerman_26_5  So it looks like Truth and Good are not mutually exclusive after all.

you sound like you’d endorse the argument that we should dissuade people from false beliefs even if those beliefs actually improve their behavior or provide them comfort.  Or more generally, that Truth trumps Good—a common unstated premise among atheists.

Given that as far as I know, there is absolutely zero evidence suggesting that religious beliefs improve behavior or provide comfort for religious people at a greater rate than atheists are able to improve their behavior or find comfort, I don’t see that it’s a relevant question.  It sounds a bit like “Well, what if eating Big Macs turns out to fight Alzheimer’s disease, then how do you feel about McDonald’s?”  Until there’s some reason to think that this is the case—some evidence—it’s not a question I can take seriously on any level.

You were challenged to say just who was doing the stigmatizing and judging, and you responded with a lot of defensive hand-waving and a link to something about a grief-stricken daughter who said “they” told her her father was going to hell. That’s a very thin pillar to support a heavy load of bile.

Everyone keeps pulling at that thread, because they don’t want to argue against Amanda’s actual point in both posts, that religion really does hurt people unnecessarily, more than it provide comfort. Suicide is just one example of the shit religion puts people through. Everyone knows there’s plenty of others.

@EG01 #211 - It was in response to my comment that the claim that belief produces good behavior and creates comfort, even if true, does not validate the belief itself.

@182

Frankly, I think the true mark of religious belief as I experience it (which is not universal, although not unique to me) is humility.

There’s something about “I’m so humble” that’s . . . not so humble. 

The thing is, there’s rarely a blanket condemnation of all forms of suicide. Throwing yourself on a grenade, pleading your moral superiority before a court determined to hang you, and accepting a challenge to an impossible duel are all more “honorable” forms of suicide depending on your culture. I’m working my way through The Count of Monte Cristo again, and Dumas is openly sympathetic toward the attempt by Edmund Dantes to escape unjust imprisonment through a hunger strike, and Pierre Morrel’s attempted suicide in the face of bankruptcy:

If I live, all would be changed; if I live, interest would be converted into doubt, pity into hostility; if I live I am only a man who his broken his word, failed in his engagements—in fact, only a bankrupt. If, on the contrary, I die, remember, Maximilian, my corpse is that of an honest but unfortunate man. Living, my best friends would avoid my house; dead, all Marseilles will follow me in tears to my last home. Living, you would feel shame at my name; dead, you may raise your head and say, ‘I am the son of him you killed, because, for the first time, he has been compelled to break his word.’

Everyone keeps pulling at that thread, because they don’t want to argue against Amanda’s actual point in both posts, that religion really does hurt people unnecessarily, more than it provide comfort.

So because she’s presenting what you feel is a valid point, it excuses her from having to back up her assertions?

She said “people were judging” the jumpers. Asking who these “people” are is a valid question. If that’s what you think is pulling at a thread, well, you’re entitled to your opinion.

  —I wish people would stop equating “equally unknowable” with “equally probable”. The answers god and not god are not remotely on the same ground of likelihood.

Ummm…the entire fucking history of the known universe?”

So that would be a sample range for your assertion on probability of not even one so far, since the universe hasn’t ended and Giod could be discovered tomorrow?

Where, exactly, is “outside the universe”?

I dunno - I didn’t say anything about “outside a universe”.  I said “the universe as a whole”.

To give an analogy, imagine two computer programs arguing, with one computer program claiming that because EVERYTHING on the computer consists of digital numbers, this PROVES that the computer itself must consist of digital numbers.

Also, please explain how a being that exists outside the bounds of the physical reality of the entire universe interacts with it. Also, why the fuck should I believe anyone who says they know anything about a being that exists outside the bounds of the physical realityof the entire universe, much less that there is something (someone, even!) there in the first place?

There still seem to be important aspects of the “sceptical agnostic” position people fail to grasp…

Or, let me lay my position down in steps:

i, Define God as an omnipotent being.  There either exists a God who reveals evidence for Its existence, a God who hides evidence for Its existence, or no God.

ii, The observable universe seems, to my understanding, to be consistent with the no God explanation.  No God is necessary.

iii, This also means that it is consistent with the Hiding God explanation.  If you could tell the difference, It wouldn’t be omnipotent, would it?

iv, Thus I remain technically agnostic.

v, Both positions remain consistent with revealed religion existing.  Basically, we’re patriachial-obsessive monkeys trying to negotiate with the weather.

vi, However, both positions remain inconsistent with revealed religion being true. If there ever was a God who ran around knocking up virgins and turning people into salt, why is there no unmistakable evidence He’s still here now?  What, He lost interest in making an appearance as people got smarter?  He doesn’t like cellphones?

vii, Thus I don’t believe any revealed religions are true.  I am functionally athiest.

This also means that if God ever gets off His Ass and starts changing the “accidents” of the Communion wafer along with the “substance” - if a guy in a robe mumbling over a cracker can turn it into meat - I’m open to changing my position.

Egnu, you appear to be tryiong to argue with point (iii) above.

I dunno - I didn’t say anything about “outside a universe”.  I said “the universe as a whole”.

Everything you’ve experienced has been inside a universe.  On what basis do you assume that these observations are relevant to the universe as a whole?

Pray tell, what is the difference between “inside a universe” and “the universe as a whole”?

There still seem to be important aspects of the “sceptical agnostic” position people fail to grasp…

That it’s weaseling and seems to combine copious amounts of holier-than-thou above-it-all-ness with special pleading for the theist position?

Yes, I agree that “no god” and “hiding god” are visually identical. My objection is that this is granting waaaaay too much credence to the concept of god. There is no evidence to even begin to mount a defense, much less a proposition of, a god in the first place. “God” is an incoherent concept that falls apart the moment people start to define it. It’s like trying to argue the existence of b!lor^p and not b!lor^p. By even starting at “let’s weigh these propositions” you’re accepting the completely unsubstantiated claims of the theists at face value without them having provided any reason for you to do so.

When your options are “I completely made something up without any relation to real world evidence” and “the thing I completely made up without any relation to real world evidence more than likely doesn’t exist”, I think you’re completely within rights to say that such a thing does not exist at all. Trying to balance the two as if they were equally likely is silly.

“Because, what if….” is not an argument. What if the proof of the nonexistence of god is in my pants pocket. Have you looked there? No? Well, OK then.

Pray tell, what is the difference between “inside a universe” and “the universe as a whole”?

See the analogy.

Yes, I agree that “no god” and “hiding god” are visually identical.

Thank you.

There is no evidence to even begin to mount a defense, much less a proposition of, a god in the first place.

You seem to be mixed up here.  The proposition logically comes before the defense, and I am making a comment about the proposition while in no way defending the concept.

“God” is an incoherent concept that falls apart the moment people start to define it.

How exactly is “an omnipotent being that hides itself from giving evidence” incoherent?  Every objection is adequately answered by the “goddoesit” defense.  Can It create a rock so large it can’t lift it.  Yes.  Can it lift it?  Yes.  Think those answers don’t make sense together?  Are you an omnipotent being?  No?  Boomshaka - It wins!  Or It doesn’t exist to begin with.

By even starting at “let’s weigh these propositions”

WHOOOP WHOOP WHOOP Hold it right there, bucko.

I’m agnostic.  I am the one who is NOT weighing the propositions.  It is YOU who is saying “this is more probable than that”.  I’m saying both exist, can’t be distinguished from each other, and make no difference to how I live my life.

When your options are “I completely made something up without any relation to real world evidence” and “the thing I completely made up without any relation to real world evidence more than likely doesn’t exist”

No, your options are “This is something I completely made up with no relation to the real world” or “this is something which exists with no relation to the real world”, and by definition there’s no way to distinguish between the two for anyone in the real world.  Either way you’re functionally atheist - you deal with the real world.

Yes, but without any evidence, there’s no reason to propose or consider the existence of a god at all, to begin with.

And, no both don’t exist. This is dragging into another argument about why agnosticism is a wishy-washy hideout for people who can’t commit to completely giving up on god. Hence: are you agnostic about the existence of garden fairies, invisible pink unicorns, etc., etc, etc…?

And, no both don’t exist.

Uh-huh.  And your evidence for this is…?

Come on - you just made a positive assertion. You agreed with me that both options were visually identical; please present your actual evidence that one of them doesn’t exist.

This is dragging into another argument about why agnosticism is a wishy-washy hideout for people who can’t commit to completely giving up on god.

Or, alternatively, the only respectable declaration for someone who doesn’t know.  Waiting for your evidence here…

Hence: are you agnostic about the existence of garden fairies, invisible pink unicorns, etc., etc, etc…?

Sure, if you define them as omnipotent beings who refuse to provide evidence.  The moment you limit them as less than omnipotent (“They’re unicorns!”), the case collapses.

Egnu, I am quite sure that agnostics exist - people who are genuinely doubtful as to whether there is or is not a God.

What I object to is not the existence of agnostics but people who keep trying to claim I must be one because it is impossible for me to be an atheist.

Witless Chum: veryone keeps pulling at that thread, because they don’t want to argue against Amanda’s actual point in both posts, that religion really does hurt people unnecessarily, more than it provide comfort.

Comeon, this is blogdom. When people make false or unproved statements in support of a good point, they need to expect to have their false (or unproved) statements contracted, picked-at, judged, etc, even when people agree with the main point - religions have hurt people unnecessarily. It’s not all religions do, but they do do that. But that’s not a reason for being an atheist: the reason for being an atheist is that God doesn’t exist.

Bitter Scribe: She said “people were judging” the jumpers. Asking who these “people” are is a valid question. If that’s what you think is pulling at a thread, well, you’re entitled to your opinion.

Well, quite.

@Comment #224: Jesurgislac on 09/14 at 03:38 AM

When people make false or unproved statements in support of a good point, they need to expect to have their false (or unproved) statements contracted, picked-at, judged, etc, even when people agree with the main point - religions have hurt people unnecessarily.

Fair enough. But it seems to me that these two threads have shown plenty of examples both of people specifically judging the 9/11 jumpers on a religious basis, and judging all suicides/attempted suicides on a religious basis.

I can’t find the humility in, “What we can observe empirically just isn’t cool enough, even if we did come from exploded stars, so I am going to make shit up/believe shit that other people made up in order to feel fulfilled.”  That’s not humility.  That is the utmost hubris.

But it seems to me that these two threads have shown plenty of examples both of people specifically judging the 9/11 jumpers on a religious basis, and judging all suicides/attempted suicides on a religious basis.

Which is good, right? Without that, it would just be the OP making false (all religions say suicide will send you to hell!) and unproved (religious people said this about the 9/11 WTC jumpers) statements. If you’re a sceptical, cynical, atheistic kind of person, you welcome that kind of discussion. I do. Apparently you don’t?

No one actually showed religious people condemning the 9/11 WTC jumpers as hellbound suicides, though. What we actually got an example of, was a distraught family in mourning making awful comments about the WTC jumper in the pic from the OTC. And I dunno about you, but when someone’s in the first throes of mourning and they make awful comments, I don’t hold it against them too hard - grief can make people do and say things they would never do in their right mind.

(all religions say suicide will send you to hell!)

Please, kindly show me a place where Amanda showed or implied that all or even most religions say that suicide will send you to hell.  Please.

<quote>Can’t something be done about him? His life is his to take, but I care about him killing people, who *do* want to live, or leaving them invalids for life, paralyzed for example. I wouldn’t call a suicide selfish, if the person kills only himself, but behaving like this *is* horribly selfish. Can’t he be told this directly? His driving license taken? At least, you can do the first. How would you and his relatives feel after he kills a family? A child? Any person?</quote>

We have been through a million and one attempts to get him into some kind of treatment. The last time we called the hospital to report that we believed he was a danger to himself and others, he left the state, and he hasn’t come back. I can’t believe they haven’t taken away his license, he’s been to driver retraining at least 5 times. He fights every ticket and many of them get nolled.

doubtthat @ 156 - Praise The Lord!!

INTPagan @ 158 - I’m not comfortable saying it either.  Since atheism doesn’t have dogma, or a rule book, etc., all one needs to be an atheist is to not believe in deities.  That’s it.  That doesn’t mean they can’t believe a whole lot of other bollocks - because whooo hoo have I met a few that do.  Anti-vax, anti-choice, libertarians - the whole lot of whacko - but still atheists.

I can’t find the humility in, “What we can observe empirically just isn’t cool enough, even if we did come from exploded stars, so I am going to make shit up/believe shit that other people made up in order to feel fulfilled.” That’s not humility. That is the utmost hubris.

This touches on what I said upthread - religion is narcissism couched in a feigned humble “aren’t I such a good person!”

It has always seemed to me (and this was true even when I was deep in religious faith myself) that religion is a way to show off. Kind of like chivalry.  Chivalry was about showing off to other dudes how impressively awesome you were to those beneath you (in this case, women).  Religion feels the same way to me. Except its about impressing everyone.

This becomes crystal clear wrt praying in public.  How many passages in the OT, NT and Koran* talk specifically about god wanting private prayer, as that is sincere.  And yet, while I’m sure they do talk to themselves in private, very large and very frequent groups of them certainly make a big grand show of doing it in public, whether or not “outsiders” are watching. 

It’s a way to show off how pious, how humble, how devout - and therefore superior - that theist, or that group of theists, believes themselves to be.

* - specifically chosen to focus on the the biggest religions. 

I’ll grant that a prime mover is theoretically possible. And I’ll also grant that a prime mover could also be theoretically called god. But as is usually the case, philosophical gods are a solution in search of a convenient hole to fill. I see no reason to privilege “god didit” over the potentially infinite number of alternatives, and I’m happy shrugging my shoulders and say, “I don’t know, but it would be damn interesting to find out.”

Ubi dubium, ibi libertas. So much apologetics amounts to, “Oh yeah atheist, well how do you explain…”

And the answer is often, “I can’t, isn’t that exciting!” Much of religious apologetics strikes me as an attempt to handwave away difficult problems by 1) creating a god to fit that hole and 2) expanding that god to be compatible with some religious flavor. While I’m content to admit that things like morality, creation, and the order of the universe are hard problems.

@226
I’m not seeing it myself.  Seeing that statement as arrogant is begging the question (the presumption that your position is correct, that there is “more”), and is therefore itself hubris.  I’d put it on the same level as the overwhelmingly common belief of the religious that a person can’t be good without god. 

And anyway, did the person who said statement you quoted claim to be humble?

Rain, my position isn’t that there is “more.”  My position is that there isn’t, that there isn’t evidence for more, and that requiring more is arrogant and presumptuous and outright denies reality.

Yes, they did. 

Frankly, I think the true mark of religious belief as I experience it (which is not universal, although not unique to me) is humility.  You realize that you know so little about the universe and your place in it.  You accept that we live with doubt and fear and uncertainty.  You learn not to be so sure that you are right.

Which is hilarious, considering that science outright says that it may not be right and that it is willing to test that premises rather than stating that it is simply unknowable and so it is acceptable to make things up.

Jesurgislac @ 227: a Google search turns up loads of message boards (including Catholic forums), some that are years old, debating the question of whether the 9/11 jumpers sinned.  That this is being debated at ALL—that people are asking this question in the first place, and this commonly—is the issue.  It pretty clearly illustrates the unproven assertion of “sin” bringing completely unneccesary angst and pain into the discussion.  Hell, it CREATES the painful discussion.  Even the folks arguing that it wasn’t sinful because it was technically homicide or a choice between falling or burning still assert this idea that everyone else who commits straightforward suicide is damned.  That so many people 1) have questioned the sinfulness of the jumpers, and 2) still accept other, more clear-cut suicides as reason enough to be sent to Hell and watch families already in immense pain suffer at the hands of the Church’s assertion, pretty much backs up Amanda’s original point.

I can’t find the humility in, “What we can observe empirically just isn’t cool enough, even if we did come from exploded stars, so I am going to make shit up/believe shit that other people made up in order to feel fulfilled.”  That’s not humility.  That is the utmost hubris.

It makes them FEEL humble.  And you should FEEL humble too.  All the better for God’s representatives here on Earth to control you, my dear.  Mwahahahahaahahahah!!!!

Now, send in a love offering of $100 to…

Wow, great post here Amanda. You’re one of the better Feminist/Atheist-Agnostic types out there, right up there with Jen McCreight and Greta Christina!

Even if science explains how absolutely everything in the universe works, there would, I think, still be something about the world that inspires awe in some people.  You can experience that awe without believing in God, clearly, but to say that the leap from that awe to a feeling that there is something that we call “god” is mere “woo” is to undeservedly denigrate it.  That’s all I was trying to say.
Comment #164: Kit-Kat on 09/13 at 05:29 PM

You seem to think science is all about banishing awe.

Science can’t explain everything, it’s actually impossible, ask any scientist (or Godel if you want to know why).  There’s always room for awe.

People who study science learn there are a zillion amazing things out there and that we’re trying to understand them.  Scientists’ job is not to squash the living shit out of any ambiguity that exists but to tease it out and then learn more about it.

People who study science learn there are a zillion amazing things out there and that we’re trying to understand them.  Scientists’ job is not to squash the living shit out of any ambiguity that exists but to tease it out and then learn more about it.

God is making it up as He goes along, and He really hates you fuckers, I hope you realise.

“Wha - brane theory?  WTF?  How the hell am I supposed to provide evidence one way or another on this one?”

It’s like he’s stuck in a perpetual oral defence and you Won’t. let.  Him.  Go.

@233 INTPagan:
Oops, sorry. Reading comprehension fail.

Jumping in in the middle here, because Kit-Kat really needs the help. Sorry if I repeat anything, but here goes.

I’m not sure what it is that I’ve been speculating and assuming about, since I am not, nor have I ever, advanced an argument here for the existence of God.

Nope, what you’re doing is being an apologist for religion. Without clearly stating your motive for doing so. It’s understandable that people might suspect that your strong defense of the religious might be borne of your own desire to have your religious views respected.

I was trying to make the point (poorly, apparently) that the mere belief in the non-rational is not, in and of itself, woo or superstition or whatever.

You need to define this term, the “non-rational.” Because from where I’m sitting, belief in the non-rational is pretty much the dictionary definition (if there is one) of “woo.” Woo is stuff that makes no sense and can’t be proved or disproved, right? How is that different from “non-rational”? Why are you quibbling with semantics, and why do you think that’s a valid way to conduct a reasonable discussion?

It’s the result of a fundamental impulse that many people have in the face of mystery.

Mmmm, nope, the fundamental impulses that give rise to religion are patternicity (or pareidolia), agenticity, and confirmation bias. Patternicity, or pareidolia, is the impulse to perceive a pattern where none exists. Agenticity is the impulse to attribute agency where none exists. And confirmation bias is our tendency to remember the things that confirm our preconceived ideas and forget the things that contradict them. Nothing to do with a sense of awe or lack thereof.

Even if science explains how absolutely everything in the universe works, there would, I think, still be something about the world that inspires awe in some people.

Only an idiot would disagree with this statement. The question is, why do you think that a sense of awe inevitably leads to religious belief? There is no obvious logical connection between the two. There are obvious non-logical connections between the two, and I mentioned several of them above. Do you think there is a logical connection? If so, what is it?

You can experience that awe without believing in God, clearly, but to say that the leap from that awe to a feeling that there is something that we call “god” is mere “woo” is to undeservedly denigrate it.  That’s all I was trying to say.

The idea that faith—belief in that for which there is no evidence—is a virtue is an idea that deserves to be denigrated. As research into cognitive neurobiology has shown, it is actually quite easy for humans to assume false beliefs, even in the face of scads of contradictory data. Faith is no virtue. It requires no special strength, and betrays no superlative achievement. It is a natural human impulse which should be fought against. The more we train ourselves to resist the impulse, the better off we’ll be.

The belief that there is a god is clearly an example of “woo,” regardless of the motivations behind the belief. If hearing people make that simple, rational, empirically supportable statement makes you uncomfortable, well, that’s your problem.

I can’t find the humility in, “What we can observe empirically just isn’t cool enough, even if we did come from exploded stars, so I am going to make shit up/believe shit that other people made up in order to feel fulfilled.”  That’s not humility.  That is the utmost hubris.

It really is sad how little most people appreciate reality for what it is. They honestly believe letting go of their fairy tales would make the world a smaller place. They have no idea how soundly reality kicks the ass of any fantasy humans have come up with in terms of wonder and awesomeness. That’s the greatest hubris of all to me.

Here’s an example of science enabling awe:  Dinosaurs had feathers and they were all different colors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/science/20feather.html