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God for a Day

Mr. X over at Why I Hate Jesus made a stunning observation. To paraphrase it would do it injustice, so I present it to you in its entirety.

If you were god for a day, what would you do with this power? Maybe you would cure cancer? Invoke your power to create world peace? Create enough resources for all so that people don’t die of starvation and malnutrition? Create a world where we can all live without killing it through polluting fossil fuels? Maybe you would show yourself to everyone so that we could all believe and all could be saved? Or, better yet, abolish hell altogether? These are just some of the potential things that you could do with this power.

So, the question is: why hasn’t god done any of these things?

So, Christians, what’ll it be this time? A defense of god’s inaction based on free will? A defense based on the prevention of dependence? I’m all ears.

The Four C’s of Atheism

The following is from an essay by August Berkshire, president of the Minnesota Atheists.

Like many of you reading this, I describe myself as a flaming liberal. Yet in one area I am a conservative. I am an atheist.

Yes, atheism is a conservative position. We make no leaps of faith. We accept statements only so far as there is reason and/or evidence to back them up. Anything else is speculation.

Atheism is also consistent. We apply our skepticism equally to all supernatural claims. We do not say, “All prophets, saviors, or gods are false – except ours.” We make no exceptions or special pleadings, which makes us consistent.

Another benefit of atheism is that it is contradiction-free. We don’t have to try to reconcile an all-loving, all-seeing, all-powerful god with the existence of evil. We don’t have to define love exactly the opposite of the way we normally define it in order to make it applicable to our god. We don’t have to claim a poor supernatural designer is intelligent.

An atheist also possesses clarity in his or her thinking processes. An atheist has the courage to follow the trail of reason and evidence wherever it may lead. If there should some day be a compelling reason or piece of evidence for a god, then we would acknowledge it and change our views. This is also known as intellectual honesty.

One of the arguments of Pascal’s Wager is that a person loses nothing by believing in a god. I beg to differ. Accepting Pascal’s Wager means saying that we are willing to abandon reason and evidence as our standards of living, and instead make a leap of faith to… where?

It’s true that by converting (or deconverting) from theism to atheism a person can lose his or her cosmic specialness and meaning in life and any hope of an afterlife. But you can’t lose what you never really had.

The reality of atheism far outweighs the dream of religion. There is an excitement and beauty to perceiving the world as it really is, and not as a wishful thought.

That last line echoes a great quote by Carl Sagan. “For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”

Amen to that.

Great Video Blog on Atheism

This is a great video that pretty much sums up my views on the perception of religion and atheism.

“I think it’s an act of supreme hubris to fill unanswered questions with a god we’ve created in our own image. To assume the world works on the same set of principles that we do is completely arrogant and intellectually weak.” – Micki Krimmel @ mickipedia.com

Quotes to Ponder

“An atheist loves himself and his fellow man instead of a god. An atheist thinks that heaven is something for which we should work for now — here on earth — for all men together to enjoy. An atheist accepts that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, subdue and enjoy it. An atheist thinks that only in knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his fellow man can he find the understanding that will help to a life of fulfillment.

Therefore, he seeks to know himself and his fellow man rather than to ‘know’ a god. An atheist knows that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist knows that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death.

He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants man to understand and love man. He wants an ethical way of life. He knows that we cannot rely on a god nor channel action into prayer nor hope for an end of troubles in a hereafter. He knows that we are our brothers’ keepers in that we are, first, keepers of our lives; that we are responsible persons, that the job is here and the time is now.” — Madalyn Murray O’Hair

I’m not saying I like what she did or how she went about it, but I like how eloquent that quote is. Her much less eloquent quote, true as it is, was:

“There is no God. There’s no heaven. There’s no hell. There are no angels. When you die, you go in the ground, the worms eat you.”