My 5 Top Tips for Atheists

Hi... it's been a while.

It has been suggested that I write a post about how to deal with being new to the wonderfully liberating world that is atheism.

I have been an atheist for 30 years. It started when I was bored one summer in 1985 and decided to read the family Bible. It was a big, old, leather bound thing with a family tree in the front of it and lots of illuminations (Bible-speak for drawings.) So, once a day I settled down in the spare room to read the book, from cover to cover. About half way through reading Genesis I became an atheist. To this day I fail to see how anyone with any sense can make it through the first two chapters of Genesis and not immediately realize that the book is fiction. I finished the Old Testament (OT) and gave up, only to go back to it a few years later when we started doing work on the New Testament (NT) in school. Trust me when I tell you that the content of the book bares little or no resemblance to what teachers and preachers tell you it says. No wonder the Christian community spends so much time and energy (and money) on apologetics... but more on that later.

Paganism crept in shortly after this, but it was always of the atheist variety, that being a belief that the "gods and goddesses" of the religion are nothing more than archetypes (see Jung) for the ways in which we express ourselves and look forward to new challenges. A less wank-tastic version of the "think like a lion become a lion" crap they try to make you do at 'self-improvement' seminars.

Anyway, since I am not new to this game I will let you new atheists (not to be confused with "New Atheists"*) into a few secrets on how to handle your new life.

Many of you reading this will not be in the liberal and accepting position I was in. My father is an ignostic aptheist, which is someone who literally does not see the point of gods and therefore doesn't give a hoot about them. My mother, was and still is a Christian, although she has not seen the inside of a regular church for as long as I can remember, except for weddings, baptisms and funerals. So, my dad puts up with my talking about atheism and theism but considers the subject to be entirely boring and my mother listens with polite amusement. I am 42 now, with kids of my own (both self-declared atheists) so what can she say, eh?

I know this might seem like a dream come true for many of you. There are those who cannot speak up for fear of harm, isolation and financial loss. I worry about you guys. It boggles my mind that a religion (and they all do this) which talks about caring and accepting everyone, puts so many caveats in place to prevent people from leaving. There are a number of reasons why, but the biggest one has to be what social psychologist Irving Janis affectionately call "groupthink".

"Groupthink occurs when a group values harmony and coherance over accurate analysis and critical evaluation. It causes individual members of the group to unquestioningly follow the word of the leader and it strongly discourages any disagreement with the concensus." - Psychology Today

For this reason I am not here to tell you how, or when, to 'come out' as a non-believer. That is for you to decide, based on your circumstances and perception of the results that might follow from such an action. My advice is to hold fast and remember that atheism is growing quickly and social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook are providing some great resources and bringing people together. You are NOT alone. Atheism is becoming more normal, and the proof of this can be seen in the recent escalation in religious people and groups becoming more vocal about their faith, and declarations of whole countries which are seeing a decline in religiosity being "Christian countries" by various politicians.

All I can tell you is that (on the whole) the atheist community are very supportive of recently deconverted atheists and the level of tolerance found here is infinitely higher than in any religion.

In with being asked to write this was a tacit request for advice on how to deal with internet theists who flood the cables with apologetics and nonsense. So here are my top 5 tips for dealing with theists online and in real life:

1. Remember that YOU do NOT have to prove anything. 

The theist is the one making the positive claim that a god exists, and therefore the onus (no matter what they tell you) is on them to prove it. Apart from saying "I don't believe your claims." you really do not have to say much else. You can be as dismissive as you like. Often I like to treat them like some drunk who tells you that they are a secret agent, or an alien. A "Really? That's interesting, but oh... look at the time... gotta run!" is all you need to say. You can block the ones who just will not quit talking at you. "So what?" is a powerful phrase.

"Atheism isn't true" - "So what?"
"So GOD is!" - "So what?"
"So YOU have to listen?" - "OK, why?"
"If you don't YOU WILL BURN IN HELLFIRE!" - "Yeah? So what?"
"You're LOST and need to be FOUND again! Find SALVATION in the arms of JEEEEEEEEEEZZZUUUUUSSS!!!" - "Yeah? OK. Whatever. See ya round mate."

The more people of this ilk start to realise that we don't care what they think and/or say, the more agitated they get, but eventually one or two do start to wonder why we don't care and look for answers. If they do so with an objective mind they usually deconvert. Trying to get a theist to be objective can be difficult. Though, that's perhaps how you got here. Hi... welcome to sanity.

2. Learn how to ask the right questions.

Let's say you have decided to engage with the theist and argue your point with them. My advice to you is to learn about Socratic Questioning, either from Dr Peter Boghossian's book "A Manual For Creating Atheists", or the excellent YouTube video series on Street Epistemology by Anthony Magnabosco. This line of thinking is extremely effective at dealing with theists.

The hardcore "hell and brimstone" types hate Socratic questioning because no matter how hard they try you just keep requesting more detailed information. This "lunatic fringe" cannot understand why you are deflecting their nonsense back at them, and even the "scholars" eventually start to hate it when their knowledge runs out and they are either forced to ignore you, go around in circles or get angry. In each cases you have won the debate. You'll get used to a lot of toys being thrown from a lot of prams on this journey.

3. Be patient. 

Many of the people you come across are victims of their own religion's brainwashing scheme. Think back to when you believed the nonsense. You may still harbour fears about losing your soul, burning in a fiery lake, or being tortured forever. Religious bullshit can be very hard to wash off.
Ask yourself how would you want to be spoken to? You have an advantage in that you have been there too and so you know how it feels to believe those things, and be in their situation. I know that for some people enlightenment came when someone ridiculed them and they got pissed enough to go looking for counter-arguments and found only common sense staring at them (like Jerry DeWitt and Matt Dillahunty) but for many telling them they're stupid only makes them more likely to entrench themselves in their beliefs.

4. Follow your own path. 

Are you interested in evolution and science? If so, then read, read, read! Lots of great books by many great authors are out there waiting for you to pick them up and read, or listen to in the car on the way to work. For some good recommendations follow people like David Smalley, or Aron Ra, or ask me. If you are not interested in evolution, or science you don't have to be. Only theists equate atheism with an interest in science and technology. You might prefer art, literature, music or any number of other things.

When you find a theist who argues that atheism is not true because evolution is false just ignore them. For one, they are using a form of logical fallacy and for another, who cares? You don't, right? Evolution isn't your thing, so just don't worry about it. Your non-belief is probably founded on your realization that the evidence for a god just doesn't stack up. It has nothing to do with science. Even if evolutionary scientists have it all wrong, the claims of the theist are no more likely to be true. In this vein I often ask that very question: "If evolutionary scientist are mistaken, how does that affect the claims made by theists about creation?" You'd be surprised how often that's met with silence, or a lot of words thrown together which don't make any sense to anyone but the person who said it (word-salad.)

It's not your job to argue FOR evolution, or any argument FOR your position at all. See point 1. The argument "Evolution isn't true, therefore Yahweh!" is no more valid than "Jelly isn't true, therefore Sasquatch!"

5. Look for inconsistencies.

When one theist makes a point, try to remember who it was who made that claim, or said that thing. For instance, if one of them says gays are evil, then make a mental note. Then, when someone else, says that gays are misguided, or putting on a show, you can point towards that other guy and say "I've heard *insert name of other person here* say *whatever he/she said*, why do you think you are right and not him/her?" or something to that effect. The point being that if theism were true and there WAS a god out there telling his subjects that ONE truth they all claim to be privy to, why do they all take up such different, and often opposite positions on things?

It's helpful, though not essential, that you learn what is and what isn't a logical fallacy. Matt Dillahunty's videos and episodes of the Atheist Experience and David Smalley's Dogma Debate are great resources.

If Christianity was uniform across the board its claim might have a bit more weight to it, but with around 40,000 versions (denominations) of it out there in the world we can be sure that, they can't ALL be right and they're probably all wrong. If one theist is really good at being consistent you can contrast his/her views with that of another and watch as the "he's wrong I'm right" arguments start.

These are my "top-tips", though other atheists approach debate in entirely different ways. I'm not always so kind to believers because their BS is so damn stupid the only thing I can offer them is my impatience.

I hope these ideas have been helpful. Thanks for reading. As usual, all comments are welcome.


*New Atheists is a term, usually used derogatorily against atheists who are vocal about their disdain for religion and the use of faith over good reasoning. Basically its used to describe any atheist who, when told to shut up by a preacher or imam, says "NO!"

The Evolutionary Road to the Present and Beyond

WARNING: THIS IS A LONG POST. 

READ IT IN BITS, OR GET A COFFEE AND DIG IN!

I am frequently amused, and often appalled, at the Creationists who come on twitter claiming that "evolutionists" are living in a fantasy world if they believe we evolved from a common ancestor to monkeys. Let that sink in for a minute... Creationists, who believe that a magic sky-daddy poofed the universe and the Earth into existence at the same time and created every living thing on the Earth, including us, his special creation, believe that we live in a fantasy world.

Amazing!

We get everything from the classic line born out of sheer ignorance of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, or TOE for short: "If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"

Oh for flip's sake... really? Almost all bisections of the animal tree occur because of some sort of physical separation. So in our case the most likely scenario is that a large number of the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees got separated from the others in their group... we can speculate how to our heart's content... and their evolution, due to the change in their environment, possibly a once arboreal species now found itself on flat lands instead, came as a result of needing to adapt to the new conditions, or die.

This evolution took millions of years... as did the evolution of the rest of the species on the other side of the divide.

That ancestor is now extinct through necessity. A species cannot evolve en masse and keep the exact traits of its former self. That's just basic evolution 101.

 The other one they now seem to be focusing on is: "There is proof of microevolution and that fits in with our 'theory' of species being able to adapt, but no macroevolution has ever been observed so that cannot be true!"

These, and I'm struggling to not call them imbeciles, cannot [or will not] get their head around the fact that in science the terms macroevolution and microevolution simply have no weight at all. No true scientists use those words. Creationists should know this, because they send enough people on scholarships to proper university biology courses so that they can proclaim that an increasing number of evolutionary biologists [aka their plants] support Creationism. On those courses they are told that these terms are invalid.

On that last point they are correct, though as someone pointed out Pluto takes over 200 years to do one orbit of the Sun, but how can we prove that it does given that we live for a maximum of 120 years?

We extrapolate data from what we see in the laboratory, and these days we use DNA evidence to support the theory. We don't even need the 250,000 fossils we have to prove anything. The DNA supports our theory perfectly.

I often wonder how these people think, but then I read the webpages they point me to and realize that for the most part they don't think. They parrot off the stuff they hear at church, which is in turn parroting stuff that people like Ken Ham dream up between snorts of cocaine and threesomes with hookers in desert road motels. Perhaps I'm being too harsh there, but you know these people aren't straight arrows, and most of them aren't even happy about not being straight.

Think of a a hundred miles... what is a single mile made of? Yards and inches. And each inch is made up of sixteenths. So, we know that a sixteenth exists because we can see it. We know the inch exists, because we can see that too. But, imagine that the hundred miles ahead of us is over bumpy ground, so we lose sight of it every so often. Got it?

If you're happier you can use metric.

OK. So we can look down that road for maybe four hundred yards, then the road dips. We can see the equivalent of say, 2300 years of our history before the road dips for a while and pops up at about the 3500 year mark. This happens over and over along this road.

As an example. We get to see snippets of our past laid out on each of the sixteenths of the inches which make up this road. "Macroevolution" is the same as "microevolution" in the same way that this fictional road is the same as the sixteenths of inches which make it up. As each bit of the road comes into view we get a view of our past and we get to examine that to work out what could possibly have happened in the dips. In the past we had to dig up bits of that history and examine the finds. Such as dinosaurs and human settlements and geological samples. We would search caves, deserts, meadows and mountains trying to find examples of things lost to the earth over vast swathes of time. On that point, just as an aside, we do know how long it takes for earth to cover stuff, so we can roughly date a find according to how far down we had to dig for it.

I know I'm labouring that point a little but you know that not everyone gets this stuff the first time around.

It takes a great deal of skill to work out what we're seeing when we find a dinosaur fossil, or part thereof. It's not guesswork as some of the Creationists will tell you. It's careful examination, recreation and experimentation. As technology has improved we can now use computer data to recreate these creatures, based on careful anatomical examination. We use microscopes to determine all sorts of features unseen to our unaided eyes. Not one single scientist working today gets away with just guessing stuff.

Even Professor Richard Dawkins has to present his work to other scientists for them to hack it to bits when it deserves to be. Yet Creationists laugh at Dawkins for his proposition that there was once a collection of land masses known as Pangaea, and that through a process of separation and drifting the continents moved away from one another to where they are today.

I am really not sure how Creationists can justify their position on this idea of Pangaea, because we know that the continents are still moving today and we measure the distances between them occasionally to make doubly sure. If we work backwards from the now and use the rate and direction of the continents' drift to calculate the position of each in the distant past we get Pangaea. It's really that simple.

Also, another side note, doesn't the Bible refer to land being a single mass which was separated by rivers and oceans? Isn't that a vague reference to Pangaea?

So we're looking at this road and seeing bits of it, trying to work out how everything happened in the dips from the stuff we can see. When we don't know exactly we say things like "this may have happened", or "could" or "perhaps this", and this uncertainty, which is entirely valid and honest in the context of science, seems to set the Creationists on fire. They are satisfied that they have the answer and are arrogantly positive about it: "The evidence is in the book!" they say, demanding that we accept that the Bible is evidence rather than the claim which we all know is the case.

Look, I don't care if the Bible is a million years old, I don't care if it was written by gold-plated angelic goat herders using giant, jet-black heron feather quills and unicorn blood, on the skins of sacrificial eunuchs, there is absolutely nothing in the Bible which can be taken as prima facie evidence for anything. Nothing. The Bible is, and always will be, a claim that the stuff in it happened. Most of it is not supported by evidence of any sort.

Sorry to have to tell you Creationists, but despite what you've been told there are NO corroborative contemporary accounts of anything Jesus is said to have said, or done, and the fact remains that the Bible is now and forever a work of fiction.

That's not blasphemy... that's just a fact.

I'm not even sure that Creationists really understand some of the implications of some of the texts, but I'll deal with that another time. The purpose of this post is just to raise an analogy which explains why scientists have to use uncertain terms to describe past events and evolutionary processes.

Despite our uncertainty over many dips in the road to our past, we do now have a helping hand. We have a traveler which has been to mostly every part of that road and has now finally reached us. I'm not talking about the crocodile, which seems to have been around for a gazillion years. I'm talking about deoxyribonucleic acid [DNA].

DNA has been with organisms for a very long time. It has been handed the baton from RNA and run with it all the way through history. A really interesting part about DNA is that some of its constituent parts may have formed in Red Giant stars. This means that when Creationists are poking us for evidence of abiogenesis on Earth, they're ignoring the idea that we might well have come from outer space! Hee hee!

Building blocks of DNA (adenine, guanine and related organic molecules) may have been formed extraterrestrially in outer space. Complex DNA and RNA organic compounds of life, including uracil,cytosine and thymine, have also been formed in the laboratory under conditions mimicking those found in outer space, using starting chemicals, such as pyrimidine, found in meteorites. Pyrimidine, like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the most carbon-rich chemical found in the universe, may have been formed in red giants or in interstellar dust and gas clouds. - Wikipedia [DNA]

Now that we've unlocked the secrets of our own genome we can read the DNA strands with relative ease. To the point where we are now using our knowledge to modify babies DNA to make them immune to certain genetic diseases. Something God forgot to do.
In our DNA we can see markers which we see in other ape species on out side of the divide, but not in other apes from the other side. We can trace our retroviral markers and figure out what changes have been made to the genome to make us happen, and make chimps happen.

This is not guesswork, this is bona fide science using the tools now available to us. Tools which can now see the very building blocks of life in full colour. We can see inside crystals, and pick out previously invisible specks of evidence from all around the world. We now know there was never a global flood. The Noah story is just another myth, which another thing the Creationists cannot accept.
We weren't created as a separate species from the Earth and women aren't the product of a man's rib. For starters there's no way you'll get a an XY being by taking parts of an XX being. Perhaps the other way around could be argued, but not that. Also, why would God create a woman if his goal was to have Adam and his "companion" look after the Garden of Eden? Surely another man would have done just as well, if not better. Men have similar strength profiles, unless you're going to include bodybuilders, or the Basques. Two men could have happily kept that garden in tip top shape forever. A woman was in fact an unnecessary addition.

The whole Creation thing is a load of hooey. For starters there's two versions of it, which Creationists seem to purposely ignore, or claim that the two opposing timelines are versions of the same event. I'd not want one of them defending me in a court that's for sure, if they can't see basic facts like that.

Evolution is a progression, one sixteenth at a time, until we cover the 100s and 1000s of miles into the past. It's like when we look at a prairie rising up to become a tall hill. The upward sweep of the lowlands forces us to ask a question... where does the hill start and the prairie end? Likewise with evolution, when precisely does species A become species B and how? What were the changes and what was the final straw which prevented the two species from being able to interbreed?

Where does the hill begin? Where do humans fit in on the future of the evolutionary tree? What will we become? Will we create a technological supreme being as has been predicted? Will we eventually be ruled over by this TechnoGod? Will the science of the future create what the Creationists have been telling us is already real?

Who knows? We don't... but one thing is for certain, Creationists really have no idea at all.