Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Worldview Caricatures

You've probably seen variations of these floating around the blogosphere:
    Christianity
    The belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie, who was his own father, can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.
Written, no doubt, by someone subscribing to:
    Atheism
    The belief that there was nothing, and nothing happened to nothing, and then nothing mysteriously exploded for no reason, creating everything, and then a bunch of everything mysteriously rearranged itself for no reason whatsoever into self-replicating bits, which then became dinosaurs.
The first caricature displays a lack of understanding about the belief it seeks to lampoon. The second is actually pretty accurate.
on

4 comments:

  1. Arthur Sido12/29/09, 8:28 PM

    Well, you can't argue with a well reasoned argument like that. Touche Mr. Paroxysm.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mr Paroxysm12/29/09, 9:20 PM

    Big bang theory != Atheism

    Thanks for playing

    ReplyDelete
  3. Chris Wilde1/2/10, 10:15 AM

    I think a more reasoned response to this is that, if you think either of those statements are accurate, or that either of those viewpoints are really that moronic, you are too bore-sighted on your own biases to be able to appreciate any nuance on the part of a differing understanding of the world.

    Certainly, by and large, Christians don't believe they get salvation by eating the flesh of a zombie. Catholicism might be criticized for coming closer to that extreme caricature in its belief in transubstantiation. But no Catholic or Protestant that holds to any kind of orthodoxy believes they worship the walking un-dead, or that they are saved merely by the act of imbibing the elements of mass or communion.

    I can't speak for all atheists. No doubt there are some who are committed to the idea that nothing came from nothing for no reason, only as a stubborn reaction against religion. In other words, they are really "Anti-theists". But most atheists are really "Non-theists". They simply find no convincing evidence for a particular creator-god or particular reason behind the existence of the universe. They find the claims of "evidence" on the part of existing organized religions to be full of logical faults, inconsistent with anything empirically observable about the world, and ultimately unconvincing. Until and unless better evidence for theism comes to light, they won't commit to a particular theistic view. Not that most really expect any such evidence to come to light.

    And then, you have the actual morons, whose choice of a belief system is based on nothing but knee-jerk reactions to their own individual life experience, and whose ability to argue for their beliefs is limited to one-liner insults and the mockery of other beliefs. I suspect this is what is behind the majority of the arguments one finds on the internet.

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  4. A. Amos Love1/8/10, 1:18 PM

    Lee

    Sure takes a lot of "faith"
    to be an atheist.

    And I have it on good info

    God doesn't believe in Atheists.

    ReplyDelete