Atheism

In Tennessee they are trying to pass the ‘Monkey Bill’. This is a piece of anti-evolution, creationist legislation which will allow science teachers to teach intelligent design rather than evolution. In effect children will be taught that evolution isn’t proven and the Bible’s version of creation is, therefore, equally valid. The Tennessee legislators want to make teaching lies legal. All this is being done in the name of religious freedom.
No one would argue that the freedom to practice your chosen religion should be curtailed, and the American constitution protects this freedom expressly, but what course of action should be taken when the faithful want to leave the realm of spirituality and philosophy and work towards undermining scientific advancement? Should religious freedom allow officials to limit the education of a generation of young Tennesseans? I would propose that faith based legislation of this kind is actually an attack on secularism. To push a religious standpoint in education, even when historical, paleontological, archeological and genetic evidence contradicts it, is both arrogant and dangerous. If this bill is passed Tennessee will enter an educational dark age. Schools will be teaching junk science and a generation of scientists will be lost.

No one becomes an Atheist. You discover you are one. The realization can be instant or, as in my case, in can be a slow process of awakening. Day by day week by week you become aware you have lost your faith. Slowly the inconsistencies and absurdities of religion reveal themselves and you wonder how you ever believed them in the first place.
Twenty years ago this would have been a simple, personal issue and that would be that. I wouldn’t have been overly concerned with the beliefs of others; their beliefs would be their business. Unfortunately the modern world has become more and more faith driven. What was a personal matter of conscious is now political. When the faiths transgress the boundaries of science and politics believers and un-believers alike should be very concerned.
If you believe that God created Adam in his image that is up to you, but when you use your power and influence to teach that to my children AS A FACT it very much becomes my problem. Teaching the Bible’s creation story as historical fact means throwing out all the scientific discoveries that academics have painstakingly worked on throughout human history. You are discarding all the other books in favour of one.
My sticking point was abiogenesis, pre-life. How do you get from non organic matter, all the rocks, gasses and chemicals, all the stuff that makes up the universe to self replicating organisms? How do you go from a primordial soup to something as complex as a cell and then on to us? I had no problem with evolution, just that first initial spark. I was quite comfortable with the three billion year journey from cell to man but God for me existed in that first cell bursting into life.
The God of the gaps, but I was scientifically astute enough to know this was an exceptionally big gap. Rocks don’t reproduce. They don’t convert nutrients into energy or reconstitute them and reproduce. But in recent years discoveries have been made with organic fatty acids that, tantalizingly, behave like cells. This is not life, but these fatty acids can absorb nutrients and split like cells. They are plentiful and occur everywhere, in space and on this planet, given enough time it can be hypothesized that maybe these acids evolved into self replicating cells. By ‘enough time’ I’m talking in the region of a billion years. To put this into perspective it has taken a little over a billion years to get from the first multicellular life to us. It took half that time for animals and plants to move from the sea to land.
I realized that I had been doing what religions had been doing from the moment of their conception, cramming God into any gap in human understanding. God was the answer to the blind spots in our knowledge. So, subsequently, as scientific knowledge grew God was pushed into smaller and smaller gaps. We used to worship the Sun, it seemed magical until we came to understand it was a result of physical laws. Gravity, pressure and finally ignited by nuclear fusion. What was mystical has now become wonderful through our understanding.

It would seem that the writers of the Bible were acutely aware that education and knowledge were a threat to their power right from the start. In the opening chapters of Genesis Adam and Eve are warned by God not to eat from the tree of life. Knowledge is forbidden right there in that first book of the Torah, man is ordered not to get above his station and is punished for eating the fruit and opening his eyes. When humanity tries to build the first skyscraper in Babel God loses his mind at the cheek of it, the presumption that men can advance themselves beyond their physical and historical limitations. The message of the Bible is clear, don’t strive to better yourselves; know your place and obey God.
Modern Christians are still threatened by this fear of learning. Hence the Tennessee bill, hence Rick Santorum explaining that the Devil started undermining American society through the universities. He postulated that Satan used the intellectual arrogance of academia to make professors and students alike believe their modern secular ideas were actually their own. Any new philosophical anti-religious strains of thought were actually a clever ruse by Beelzebub to trick the country’s intellectual elite away from God. It’s a clever statement; if you’re losing the intellectual argument then you argue the argument itself is corrupt. You take pride in your holy ignorance and you can do this, by definition, without any evidence what so ever.
This sort of argument isn’t new. Catholicism’s guidelines on weakness of faith throw the fault straight back at the doubter. God is infallible therefore your doubts are your fault, if you can’t make head nor tail out of the faith’s inconsistencies it is your limited understanding and intellectual failings. In other words the church doesn’t have to explain itself, you have to prey harder and ignore your own conscious.

So we find ourselves in a strange absurdist reality now where the American religious elite are proud of their ignorance. They are more interested in revelation than hard facts, unless the facts in question bolster their agenda. So when scientists speak of a theory they interpret this as a doubt. They see micro evolution everywhere, in their breeds of dogs for example, but because the driving force of macro evolution has yet to be established they throw the whole thing out. Elevating the gaps and, ironically, calling a belief in evolution a religion in itself in order to discredit it, yet never seeing the irony in that statement.
These people want to run America, they want executive power. Personally I don’t want a world super power led by people who believe the prophesies of the Book of Revelation, and believe Armageddon will result in their own rapture. Actually believing they will be carried up bodily to heaven before the world ends to live with God. American Christians even travel to Israel to help Jews establish themselves in Palestinian lands because one of the prerequisites of the apocalypse is the Jews returning to the Promised Land. We should call this exactly what it is, a death cult. In the early days of the faith Christians went gladly to their deaths, emulating Christ, in order to secure salvation; the belief in the rapture takes this a step further and drags the rest of the world into the delusion. You would think wanting to usher in the end of the world in order to fulfill the two thousand year old rantings of a troubled mind would prevent you from attaining office, yet it seems that such beliefs now hold political weight in America.

This should scare you.

Over here we are more sedate, we don’t have the fundamentalist mind set of America and for the most part England is a very secular country. Most people don’t attend church and any belief in God is normally personal and kept to oneself. But Christianity has begun to feel threatened over here. Christians don’t feel they can express their faith and feel persecuted by what they refer to as militant secularism. Currently this is an attack on their institutionalized homophobia. But recently other manifestations of the faith have been questioned. A nurse was suspended for taking her beliefs to work and offering to pray for patients. The right wing press championed her cause and many people saw this as a harmless expression of her Christianity.
But let’s examine this; this woman was being employed as a medical professional, her training is scientific and she was being called upon to use her scientific knowledge to help people. Why would her superstitions be needed here? Why offer to pray for the recovery of a little girl’s broken leg, which is what she got reported for, when the application of a cast and nature would take care of it? Why offer to pray at all, why was permission needed for her to ask her God for a speedy recovery? It was not in her remit to offer spiritual help in this case, her job was to check on the leg and apply the skills that had been developed for that purpose. Too many people prayer often seems like a last resort, so what confidence would it have given the girl’s mother when it was offered. Very little I think.

European Christians complain that they get a bum deal compared to Islam and in a lot of respects they are right. In a multicultural society efforts are made to accommodate immigrants and foreign cultures. Unfortunately when it comes to Islam the rights of the religious culture have superseded the rights of Muslim individuals, namely women.
Islam hates women more than Christianity does. The misogynistic verses still exist in the Bible but by and large modern Christians have forgotten them. The Renaissance allowed Christianity to absorb Humanist ideals of morality and then, over time, pass them off as its own. The Church is still happy to stick its nose into everyone’s uterus but by and large has stopped stoning and burning women. Islam hasn’t, but Sharia law is lifted almost word for word from the Bible.
The Quran’s similarity to the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, is no accident. In Mohammed’s time Jerusalem was the centre of the universe. I mean this literally, the earth was the centre of the cosmos and Jerusalem was the hub that the whole world revolved around. To give Islam credibility The Prophet had to connect the faith to the Holy Land. As Mohammed never set foot in Jerusalem this could only be done through revelation. We always hear that the three big faiths have a claim to the Holy City and this is where all the trouble stems from, but it is Islam’s claim that shows the persuasive power of revelation on the faithful. The Jews built the city and their great temple, the centre of the centre of the universe if you will; Christ died and was resurrected there. But what of Islam’s claim?
It is said one night Mohammed was carried there on a winged horse from Medina; he flew to the site of the temple and from there ascended into heaven to lead the prophets of the Bible in praise of God. Let me reiterate, Mohammed went to bed in his tent one night then the next morning claimed he had flown to Jerusalem on a horse and was raised into heaven. Muslim scholars debate whether or not this was a physical event or a God given revelation but either way it is irrelevant, this is Islam’s claim to Jerusalem. War and invasion would solidify it after the Prophet’s death but the initial claim originates from a dream, a vision, possibly an epileptic fit or just a convenient lie that Mohammed told one morning.

This wasn’t unusual for Mohammed; his life was filled with convenient revelations. After a humiliating defeat in battle against his enemies from Mecca God came to him and explained he shouldn’t worry as this was part of the master plan. Luckily for Mohammed history would prove this right, or it at least gave him a second chance to get it right. God came to him again and told him it was perfectly fine for him to marry the six year old daughter of a friend that he had his eye on. This gave him a valuable alliance and he had the decency to wait for the girl to turn nine before her consummated the marriage.
It is this marriage that modern Muslims find so hard to explain away. Pedophilia isn’t prohibited in any of the Holy books mainly because the concept was alien to the ancient mindset. When a girl started menstruating she was ready for marriage and sex. Whether she was ten or thirteen was irrelevant, life was short and hard and daughters where married off young and expected to bare children. Islam’s philosophical problem with this is that it claims that the Quran is the most perfect book ever written, superseding any book before or after. Its writer, The Prophet, is the perfect ideal of manhood. He is the ideal man and should be emulated; his actions can not be questioned. Any perceived disrespect of Mohammed in Islamic theocracies is punishable by death. Here lies the problem. Modern Muslims can pass off the marriage to Aisha as a reasonable match for the time and the culture that Mohammed grew up in, but that makes him just a man of the sixth century, not the perfect example for humanity. If sleeping with a 9 year old is wrong then Mohammed was wrong and this undermines all the tenants of Islam; if The Prophet is the perfect example of a servant of God then sleeping with a child is perfectly fine.
This is just one aspect of Islam’s misogyny. At the heart of the religion lies the concept that men are absolved of responsibility for their lust. Women have to be covered in order to stop men desiring them and pursuing them or possibly even raping them. It is taken as a given that men cannot control themselves, the mere sight of female flesh will distract them from the true path. For the same reason alcohol is prohibited. The individual doesn’t need to take responsibility for their actions. Temptation is perceived as all powerful so every precaution has to be taken to prevent that temptation. The idea that the responsibility is on the individual to control themselves is lost.
So Muslim women claim the right to cover themselves head to foot, for fearing that being desired will instigating some horrendous act. Muslim men cover their wives so they cannot be coveted; all trust in human control is gone after a lifetime of religious socialization.

The Atheist has to take responsibility for himself; his actions are his own. It is telling that over ninety percent of American prisoners believe in a God. This makes perfect sense. If you believe the Devil can control your actions then your crimes aren’t really yours. Couple this with the belief that Jesus will forgive you anyway, and you have a perfect storm and can abandon any personal responsibility.

Atheism as a movement is in its infancy. It has always been there in the background but it has started to emerge in the last decade as a philosophical force. Social media is allowing American and Arabic Atheists and Agnostics to network and exchange ideas, something that would have been fraught with risk just a few years ago. Many Atheists fear that they will be ostracized by their communities if they publically ‘came out’. In Middle Eastern theocracies, where scientists still quote the Quran as the inspiration for a break-through, the punishments can be severe. To respect someone’s right to hold a faith doesn’t mean you have to respect the faith. Just a few months on twitter has opened my eyes to the religious delusion out there. The faithful really can be hateful.

Everyday the world seems to be slipping back into theocracy. All over the globe the secularism that we took for granted in the seventies and eighties is under threat. All the Republicans standing in the primaries consider themselves devout Christians. The men that wish to become the President purport to believing in the power of prayer. They openly admit to talking to God and that this actually has the power to change the physical world. They believe the God of Abraham, the God that told Noah to build the Ark thousands of years before that technology even existed, is on their side. These men want to stop women getting contraception because of a verse in a two thousand year old book. They believe that it should be a right to teach children that the world is only six thousand years old and that dinosaur bones were buried by the Devil to test their faith. They believe they are good and there is evil in the world trying to undermine American Christian purity. This is so entrenched in American society that when a radicalized Christian tries to blow up an abortion clinic it is never referred to as terrorism.

Religion is trying to take over the world again. If these people get their way we WILL enter an intellectual dark age. Humanity can only move forward scientifically and sociologically if it chooses to. Do not take it as a given that we can’t move backwards as a species and embrace superstition over reason. It can happen and in some places in the world it is happening. Catholic missionaries are preventing the distribution of condoms in AIDS ridden Africa. Anti woman ‘pro-family’ legislation is being passed in America.

Atheist numbers are swelling, over the next few years this intellectual battle will play out. Reason has to win it. It took six hundred years for the Renaissance to pick up where the Roman Empire left off. The world is too precarious a place now to allow another dark age to descend.