A stronger version of atheism:
"A-Deism: the certainty that supernatural beings or forces neither exist nor could interfere with the physical realm without becoming part of the physical. Although concepts of supernatural beings or forces exist, neither these conceptualizations themselves nor personal belief in the conceptualizations constitutes evidence for ascribed existence of a supernatural agency.
A-Deism is based on logical analysis of relevant physical and psychological evidence and does not itself constitute a religion. Critical A-Deistic analysis holds that it is neither necessary nor rational to evoke supernatural pseudo-explanations for the origin of the universe (cosmology), the origin of life on Earth (abiogenesis), or biological complexity (evolution). Further, death marks the end of conscious life, so adeists have neither the expectation of eternal life nor any fear of eternal damnation."
A-Deism
New Atheism
First, let's define atheism as the rational position of disbelieving the existence of that special, human invented category termed the "supernatural". There is nothing new about atheism in so far as disavowal of the content of religious mythologies has a long history.
The "New" element to atheism refers to the recent vocalized communion of atheists who are calling for a replacement of magic-thinking and intolerance with rationality and mutually inclusive morality. PZ Myers does not like the term, New Atheist, yet he describes the position well, so here he is in response to Jonathan Haidt's misguided criticism of the New Atheism:
"The New Atheism isn't about throwing away moral systems or introducing a new dogma, it's about opening up a protected realm to inquiry and sweeping away old cobwebs, refusing to allow people to hide absurd ideas from criticism behind the foolish plea of faith. It's much more compatible with the spirit of science to question the follies of the priests than to argue that because priests hand out charity, we should overlook the fact that they also claim that gods speak to them and tell them who is naughty and who is nice, and that the good boys and girls will receive magical rewards."
"In light of this, it struck me then and still strikes me today that it is the height of
foolishness to think that Richard Dawkins is any significant part of the problem. Even more foolish is the idea that these sorts of religious beliefs are things to be pandered to, respected, and tiptoed around. Surely an essential part of any solution to the problem is loud and frequent public criticism of religious ideas that, let's be honest, can not be defended on any rational basis.
The only thing I don't understand is why that isn't obvious to everyone." ¬ Jason Rosenhouse on EvolutionBlog
Homo religioso
On Homo religioso: "Homo sapiens had emerged by about 250,000 years ago. Humans have a propensity, which is presumably absent in other animals, for inventing supernatural deities to "explain" that which humans could not yet understand. Some religious superstitions were written down by their inventors with the attached claim of having been dictated by the purported deity."
Infectious Repetitis
Philosopher Dan Dennett tossed this phrase out during a TED talk on dangerous memes. (I enjoy puns, so I liked the term.)
The term, judging from googling, is used mostly in connection with graphic design and architecture.
Unlike, memes, which are capable of mutation while being transmitted, infectious repetitions are passed on and on and on unmodified. (This phenomenon is akin to the substitution of regurgiquotes for original, critical thinking.)
Infectious repetitis would be all well and good if the original idea or design had great merit, but this is too often not the case. Take, for example – you guessed it! – religion. The content of J-C-I religious dogma is passed on and on, unexamined except at the mutation points. The sole claim to veracity for scriptural dogma comprises its having been believed previously. Ultimately, in the most circular of all claims, dogma is claimed to be true because it was initially "revealed".
The consequences of doubting dogma have historically ranged from dire to not so dire – burning at the stake, execution, excommunication (only a punishment if you believe the myths), exile, social ostracism, verbal insults in print.
Little Johnnyism and Little Kirkism
"Little Johnnyism" is a variant of fallacious appeal to authority. Parents used some variant of "Little Johnny" to convince us of how to behave: "Your cousin does the dishes", "Little Amanda keeps her room clean", "Little Johnny mows his parents’ lawn", and "The starving children in India would love your mother's cooking". Our parents assumed that such comparison to Little Paragons of Virtue would convince us to behave as our parents wished.
Religionists, in arguments that are not elevated above such childish fallacies, assume that examples of prominent believers–authors, scientists, etc–demonstrate that we all ought to be believers. Logically, all that these "Little Believer" examples demonstrate is that those who were indoctrinated as children may retain ridiculous credulities despite later achievements.
Little Kirkism appears to have been coined by Arthur Vandelay: "
Some apologists, like Kirk Cameron, will even cite (or, as I suspect, manufacture) their own atheist pre-history and subsequent conversion tale—call it “Little Kirkism”—and then claim to know what all atheists think (and presume to tell atheists what atheists think)."
As a group, united only by disbelief in Yagoal* or Brahman, atheists certainly do not think alike, though most whose disbelief arises through a logical refusal to believe ridiculous mythologies will be, by extension, immune to these "Little Dimmism" fallacies of logic.
* This term is derived from a concatenation of the "Yahweh-God-Allah" Abrahamic deity.
NOMA
NOMA, for non-overlapping magisteria, represented Stephen Jay Gould's now unpopular suggestion, in Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, of assuming an inextricable separation between science and religion.
Gould proposed that science, which dealt solely with the physical or empirical magisterium, was totally distinct from religion, which was confined to questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. In essence, NOMA incorporated the harmony seeking suggestion that never the twain should meet.
The term magisterium describes a domain of understanding in which only one form of investigation or teaching possesses the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution. The notion of NOMA protects religion from scientific scrutiny even though 'scientific' claims including genesis, floods, and miracles are described in the Bible.
Gould's suggestion has been criticized by evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, and by philosopher of science as applied to evolutionary biology, Michael Ruse.
More from Ruse : Stephen Jay Gould: An Appreciation . Being Mean to Stephen Jay Gould :Obviously, things cannot be quite this simple. Even if one ignores what Ian Barbour has shown us in a helpful taxonomy, namely that Gould's NOMA is not the only possible stance on the science/religion relationship, the Gouldian separation ploy requires some further work. Prima facie, Genesis does tell us things which conflict with science - six days of creation, humans last, world-wide flood, tower of Babel, and so forth. If you are to insist that there is no conflict - and, in respects, I am happy to go along with Gould on this - then you have got to work to show that Genesis properly understood and science properly understood do not conflict. Prima facie conflict is no more than that -- prima facie -- and not definitive. ¬ Michael Ruse, Review of Stephen Jay Gould's "Rocks of Ages"
biological evolution, philosophy, religion, science, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Michael Ruse,
Spell-checkers write the darndest things!
I found this blooper embedded within a post in reaction to a Washington Post article. The blog post likened meetings of atheists to church attendance:
Ahem, I think that you intended to write "tenets". (Tenants is alarmingly common, I have also seen it in a YouTube video clearly written by an educated person.)"the vast majority of Americans who are sympathetic to the tenants of our Faith."
He argued that the scientific method can't show us what is write and wrong,
what goodness is or tell us why to be good.
It isn't right to write 'write' when you mean to write 'right'.
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I doubt that the following homophone can be blamed on a spell-checker:
"for him, GW is fake, Bush is sane, and all illegal immigrants should be shot on site."
At which location, pray specify, should illegal immigrants be shot?
I think that errors like this arise from writing phrases that are more commonly spoken than written.
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Another amusing example of misspelling:
"Bare with me."
One isn't sure whether this is a request to be tolerant or to strip.
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"It is high time people start calling a spade a spade and not give undue reverence to religion, which does not deserve even a single aorta of respect from the secular community."
Ahum, that would be iota of respect, and not respect concerning the largest artery in the body. I suspect that this one cannot be blamed on a spell-checker. Instead, it probably reflects the fact that this writer has only heard the expression and not seen it written. I guess that we should be thankful that, being of a medical bent, he didn't write "calling a spayed a spayed."
I do agree that religious delusionism deserves no respect.
Students also write the darndest things as compiled in Non Campus Mentis.
Git of the Gaps
"The history of science shows us that patching the gaps in our knowledge with
miracles creates a path that leads only to perpetual ignorance."
~ Jerry Coyne, The Great Mutator, in The New Republic
Definition of Religion
This definition, from philosopher, A.C. Grayling explains why atheism, contrary to yet another fallacious theist argument, is not a religion:
"By definition a religion is something centred on belief in the existence of supernatural agencies or entities in the universe; and not merely their existence, but their interest in human beings on the planet; and not merely their interest, but their particularly detailed interest in what humans wear, what they eat, when they eat it, what they read or see, what they treat as clean or unclean, who they have sex with and how and when; and so for a multitude of other things, like making women invisible beneath enveloping clothing, or strapping little boxes to their foreheads, or iterating formulae by rote five times a day, and so endlessly forth; with threats of punishment for getting any of it wrong. But naturalism (atheism) does not premise such belief." (P.29 in Grayling, A.C., (2007) Against All Gods. London: Oberon Books.)
Menace of Religion
"After all, we live in a time when blowing children to bits is an increasingly popular form of worship, the most powerful man on earth thinks he's got a hotline to God, and much of the electorate who gave that man his power would never consider replacing him with someone who does not believe the son of a carpenter who died 2,000 years ago sits in heaven advising presidents, fixing football games, and waiting for the day he will return to the Earth to brutally murder all unbelievers and erect a worldwide dictatorship." ¬ Those Fanatical Atheists by Dan Gardner, The Ottawa Citizen (posted by Skavar)
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." ¬ Susan B. Anthony
"No philosophy, no religion, has ever brought so glad a message to the world as this good news of Atheism." ¬ Annie Wood Besant
"As people become more intelligent they care less for preaches and more for teachers." ¬ Robert G. Ingersoll
"The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church." ¬ Ferdinand Magellan
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless
world, & the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the
people." ¬ Karl Marx"The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind." ¬ HL Mencken
"People say we need religion when what they really mean is we need police." ¬ HL Mencken
"The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.
...True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge. Did Darrow, in the course of his dreadful bombardment of Bryan, drop a few shells, incidentally, into measurably cleaner camps? Then let the garrisons of those camps look to their defenses. They are free to shoot back. But they can't disarm their enemy." ¬ HL Mencken"In the absence of fear there is little faith." ¬ Michael Pain
"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours" ¬ Stephen Roberts
"It is said that men may not be the dreams of the Gods, but rather that the Gods are the dreams of men." ¬ Carl Sagan
"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means." ¬ George Bernard Shaw
“Good people will do good things, and bad people will do bad things. But for good people to do bad things – that takes religion." ¬ Steven Weinberg.
