A blast from the past

When I started this blog, it was probably the first time that I "publicly" stated my opinions on religion and philosophy.  I generally kept these thoughts to myself.  However, I thought this blog would be a good forum to express some of the thoughts I have, and perhaps to start some conversations about these subjects with people with whom I've never spoken of them before.

Obviously, my disbelief in religion didn't start when I started this blog.  I wrote the following eleven years ago.  I've kept it to document my thinking at the time.  I've matured and become more educated about philosophy, rationalism, and skepticism since then.  My thoughts and arguments are more informed and refined.  However, the fundamental belief has not changed. 
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"What I Believe"

I am an atheist.
 
Let me give a couple of definitions just to make things clear. A theist is someone with religious beliefs, that is, someone who believes in a god or gods. An atheist is someone who has no religious beliefs, that is, they have no belief in any god or gods. So atheism is a statement about a lack of belief, it says nothing about what an atheist actually believes. Actually, I’m what is sometimes called a strong atheist or a nontheist. Not only do I have no belief in a god or gods, but I believe gods do not exist. This is a stronger statement than simply saying I’m an atheist.

I do not believe that any gods, especially the Christian God, exist. Nor is there any Heaven or Hell. We are born, we live our lives, we die, and that’s the end of that. There is no existence after life. This makes it especially important that we live a happy, constructive, and fruitful life while we are on this planet. We are not here to prepare for something after life; we are just here. There is no "meaning of life". The only meaning to life is that meaning which we give to it. We are not here "for a purpose". We provide our own purpose to life.

Because this life is all we have, life is incredibly precious. To take someone’s life is to take the most important thing that person has. To waste one’s own life is to waste the most important thing you have. Life should be valued highly, and we should live our lives to the fullest. The biggest "sin" is to fritter one’s life away waiting for some reward in the afterlife instead of making our own "heaven" here on Earth. We do not forgive others because it is what Jesus would do. We do it because when we forgive, we retain the opportunity to continue to have the love and companionship of those we forgive. This is what enriches our lives and makes life worth living. When religion works, it is by distilling the knowledge of those who came before us and giving us examples of how to live our lives in a way that makes us happy and makes others happy.

How did I get to be an atheist?

There was no single event or incident which "caused" me to become an atheist. I’m not an atheist as a simple rejection of the Catholic Church (under whose teachings I was raised) nor as a rejection of any individual’s beliefs. Becoming an atheist was the result of a decades-long search for the truth.

As I mentioned above, I was raised in the Roman Catholic Church. As early as my First Communion, I felt that something just wasn’t quite right about what the church was teaching. I remember wondering why I had to confess my sins to a priest if God was everywhere and knew what I was doing at all times. Now, as an adult, I know that the main reason for this is to make the confessor think about their sins and be remorseful for them. The point is not that this was a major inconsistency in the Catholic dogma, but that at that early age (6-7 years old) I was already questioning the practices and teachings of the church.

I remember a later incident in Catechism where we were asked to tell of some time that we had experienced God in our lives. I couldn’t think of any. One kid in the class talked about how he was pushing something heavy up a hill and asked God for help. He found the strength to make it to the top after that. I thought, "how does that prove that God helped? He could have just found the strength within himself."

By the time I was in sixth or seventh grade, I was no longer going to Catechism. However, I still considered myself a Catholic.

In my seventh grade English class, we had to do a debate. The topic I drew was abortion. I took the anti-abortion side. For my sources, I found a bunch of religious pamphlets that preached about the sanctity of God-given life and how abortion was tantamount to murder. I argued this case in the debate. After the debate, my teacher, Mr. Lawson, commented to me that I had made an argument from a position of religious faith. Since faith is a system that is unassailable, what I had done was not debate, but put forth a position against which there was no rational argument. Since I respected Mr. Lawson, I took his words to heart. This was when I first started to acquire the tools for rational thought and evaluation that I would need on my search for the truth.

By the time that I was in high school, I believed that there must be some religion out there that possessed the truth about God. I knew it wasn’t the Catholic Church, so I started looking around for "the One". I had become what amounted to a Fundamentalist. I believed there was a God, and that the Bible was the true word of God. But I disagreed with the fact that, in the Catholic Church, the Priest read and interpreted the Bible to you. You were not encouraged to read it and interpret it for yourself. Since I disagreed with how they interpreted the Bible, I decided they didn’t know the true message in the Bible. At some point around the eleventh grade, I encountered a cult called The Way. They claimed to have a cadre of biblical scholars who had reevaluated the Bible using the original documents. They gave examples of how verses in the King James version of the Bible had been incorrectly translated and they had the real translation. I thought I had finally found the truth. These people had the true "Word of God". I went to one of their church meetings and was listening with an open mind until they did their "speaking in tongues" trick. I thought, "more hogwash". This meeting was supposed to be a friendly, informal meeting for a few of us who were interested. When they passed the hat at the end, I knew this was just another rip-off.

This episode didn’t stop my search. And I was still of a Fundamentalist bent when I entered college. It was sophomore year at Denison when a critical turning point in my life occurred. I was sitting up one night talking with my roommate discussing religion. He was either a religion or philosophy major (I forget which). He ended the conversation with the following statement: "You have to question your beliefs". What he meant by this is not that we should automatically reject the beliefs we were raised with. Instead, we should question all our beliefs. We should ask ourselves why we believe what we believe. There are two possible outcomes of such an enquiry. One outcome is that we realize that we don’t have a good reason to believe what we believe, and in fact, we should believe something else. The other outcome is that we continue to believe what we believe, but now, since we’ve thought about why, we have a good reason to believe it. Our belief therefore becomes stronger, and it is based on our own, personal reasons. We shouldn’t believe things simply because that’s what we were raised to believe or because that’s what everyone else believes.

This was really a life-changing event for me. It got me to step back and change the question from "which church has the truth about God?" to "what is the truth about God?" Never before had I even considered the question of whether God even existed at all.

The next big event on my evolution was senior year at Denison in my Philosophy of Feminism class. We were reading a book called, "The Redemption of God." It was the Ph.D. thesis of a woman who explored the fundamental patriarchal nature of the Christian God. Her hypothesis was that God could be "redeemed" if we redefine what God is. Instead of the all-powerful gray-bearded man, God is simply the power of Love in the world. Jesus wasn’t necessarily the Son of God, but was someone particularly gifted in channeling the power of Love to help and heal others. This was the first time that I came across the concept of redefining God. I mean, God just was, right? But here this woman redefined God into something that made a whole lot more sense to me than what any Christian church had ever told me. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Maybe she was right. Maybe God wasn’t this thing that churches had taught me "He" was, maybe God was something else.

It was at about this same time that I started reading some Existential philosophy. I came across Jean-Paul Sartre’s statement with respect to God:
"Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would change nothing." Or, to restate this "It does not matter if God exists or not, I am still responsible for my own actions." I basically agree with Existential philosophy. We are all ultimately responsible for our own actions. It doesn’t matter what the situation is, we make a choice to act in a certain manner. It is our choice, and we are responsible for the results of our actions. So I think Sartre was right. If we were to do things because we thought that is what God wants, it still does not absolve us from the responsibility for those actions. We can’t abdicate responsibility for our actions because it’s "God’s will." Once we realize this, we realize that the existence or nonexistence of God really doesn’t matter. If we act in a moral way, we do it because we want the societal and personal benefits of that. If we act in an immoral manner, we accept the societal and personal punishment that we will receive. God doesn’t enter into the equation.
I continued my quest. I discussed it with friends; I read books. But at this time, I knew that I didn’t believe that the Christian God existed.

It wasn’t until probably around the summer of 1989 that I realized that I was an atheist. I had searched and searched, and kept coming back to one fundamental thing, God doesn’t make sense.

So, for about eleven years now, I’ve been an atheist. I’ve read a number of books on atheism, rationalism, and science. These books resonate with what I see as being the truth about the universe. By applying Occam’s Razor, if we take any model of the world that contains a god, we can take the same model minus the god and get just as good an explanation of how the universe works. I have yet to see, hear about, or read about anything that exists or has ever occurred where the best explanation requires the existence of a god.

I consider myself a good scientist. As such, if someone came to me with some concrete evidence of the existence of a god, I would be forced to consider the validity of this data. Because it is physically impossible to search the entire universe to show that a god does not exist, I have to concede the possibility of a god. However, given the overwhelming absence of evidence of such an entity, I believe that no such being exists.

Therefore, my lack of belief in any god or gods makes me an atheist.  My belief that, in fact, no such beings actually exist makes me a strong atheist or nontheist.

Written in the Summer of 2000.

Watered Down

I was recently traveling in France, and, as often happens when I travel, I found myself one day with a bit of nausea and general stomach trouble.  So, we went to the pharmacy and asked for an anti-nausea medicine.  The pharmacist gave us one that she said would work with no side effects.  I looked at the ingredients and found that it was a homeopathic medicine.  Since I know what homeopathic medicine is, I told her that I wanted something else, because homeopathic medicine doesn't work.  She disagreed, but gave me a different medicine.  For this medicine, she warned me that there could be some side effects, such as drowsiness.   I thought that was fine, paid for the medicine, and left. 

Why did I refuse the homeopathic medicine?  Contrary to what a lot of people think, homeopathic doesn't just mean "natural" (as if "natural" equals "safe and effective").   Homeopathic "medicine" was developed in the early 1800's at least 30 years before Louis Pasteur's work on germs and the development of our current understanding of how bacteria, viruses, genetics, and other factors are responsible for  disease.  Homeopathic was developed by only looking at symptoms of diseases, since the causes weren't understood at that time.  It is based on two principles.  The first is the "law of similars".  This "law" states that "like cures like".  That is, if I have nausea, I should take a homeopathic preparation made from something that would induce nausea in an otherwise healthy person.  Of course, now that we know about germs, the law of similars is pretty ridiculous.  Some people confuse this with how vaccines work.  Vaccines inject pieces of the virus's actual proteins and other molecules into the body to get the immune system to work as it normally does to produce an immunity.  This is completely different from using a homeopathic preparation based on a chemical that is nothing like what is causing the ailment, but happens to induce the same symptoms.

The second principle upon which homeopathic is based is the idea that water has memory.  Homeopathic medicines are made by taking the substance chosen based on the law of similars and then diluting it repeatedly.  The idea is that the water will remember the substance, thus increasing its potency, while diluting the toxicity.  Somehow the water only remembers the good parts, I guess.  Then, the water is either dropped onto a sugar pill or taken as a liquid to treat the ailment.  The dilutions used are listed on the box with numbers like 10X or 4C.   They represent how many times that a drop of preparation is diluted into 10 (for X) or 100 (for C) times the amount of water.   So a 5C preparation (like the anti-nausea pills I was offered) means that one drop of the preparation is diluted in 100 drops of water.  Then one drop of that solution is diluted in 100 drops of water.  Then one drop of that solution is diluted in 100 drops of water.  This is repeated two more times to get 5C.  This represents one drop of the original substance in 10,000,000,000 drops of water.  To put this in perspective, this is like dissolving an aspirin in a swimming pool of water.   The creator of homeopathy advocated a 30C dilution.  At this level of dilution, it would be equivalent to having one molecule of the original substance dissolved in a drop of water the size of our solar system.

Of course, at these levels of dilution, the explanation for how the "medicine" works is that the water remembers the substance.  With what we know about how H20 molecules float around randomly in a liquid water, there is absolutely no possible way that information could be stored by them.  It is a physical impossibility for them to have memory.  However, let's think about it for a minute.  What if water did have memory, and thus homeopathic could work.  This would be incredible for the pharmaceutical industry.  They could make one batch of a drug and then just keep diluting it to produce more to sell.  All drugs would cost the same, since the cost of creating the original substance would be insignificant given the large quantities that could be produced from it. 

Let's go further with this.  If water had memory, then we would have "water archeologists" who would study the memories in water to discover information about those things the water has touched in the past (see my previous blog about how many things this could be).   Water could be used in forensics at crime scenes.  We would have TV shows like CSI:Water.  Water treatment plants would have to find ways of erasing the bad memories in water to make it safe to drink.  Who wants to drink water that has the memory of just being in someone else's toilet?  When we go to the bar, instead of complaining that the bar is watering down our drinks, we would want them to.  It would make the drinks stronger without adding the cost of extra alcohol.   We wouldn't have the concept of drowning.  If our lungs were deprived of oxygen, the water in the blood would remember the oxygen it carried before, and that would be sufficient to keep us alive.  In fact, perhaps we would only need to take a few breaths when we are first born, and that would keep us alive for the rest of our lives.   If water had memory, computer companies would be doing research on creating the equivalent of disk drives that use water for storage.  I would be bragging about how my new PC has 2 gallons of storage space or complaining because I lost my music collection when my storage sprang a leak.

The people who make and sell homeopathic medicine are banking on the fact that you don't know how it is supposed to work.  It's magical thinking.  They advertise "no side effects".  Of course there are no side effects - there are no effects!   But they want you to confuse it with all the other "alternative" medicines that are out there that promise cures to your ills without having to trust your doctor or drug companies or hospitals.   To add to the confusion, a lot of pills being sold put the word "homeopathic" on the label when they really aren't.  They may actually contain significant quantities of potentially active ingredients.   With true homeopathic pills, you can take as many as you like.  Since there isn't any real active substance in them any more, they won't hurt you.  In fact, there is a common stunt that skeptics do where they commit "homeopathic suicide" by eating an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills.   Of course, nothing happens when they do this.  I wouldn't recommend this stunt with just anything marked "homeopathic" though. 

When you see a box of pills marked "Homeopathic", realize that what it really says is "we think you are a sucker and will pay good money for sugar pills".   So if you have a real sickness, take real medicine.  Don't waste your money and delay proper treatment trying fake "medicines" like homeopathy.

Defending Marriage

I'm white.  My niece is white.  She is married to a black man.  They have a lovely mixed-race daughter who just celebrated her first birthday. In their marriage, the fact that the spouses are different races in no way diminishes the quality of the love they share, the partnership that they feel, their commitment to one another, or their ability to be good parents to their daughter. 

As recently as 1967, during my lifetime, it would have been illegal for them to be married in some states.  In Virginia, they would have been guilty of a felony and could spend a year in jail.  Their daughter would have been a social outcast.  Anti-miscegenation laws, as they are called, have a long history in the US.  The primary arguments against interracial marriage were religious.  In the Loving v. Virginia case that ended anti-miscegenation laws in the US, the trial judge in the case argued that God had put the different races on different continents for a reason, and it was a violation of his will to let them mix.  Mixed-race marriages were considered an assault on traditional, same-race marriage.  It was thought that mixed-race marriages could not produce children, or that the children produced would be inferior or "mongrels".  Thus, such unions should not be allowed. 

Fortunately, those laws were declared unconstitutional in 1967.  My niece and nephew-in-law can legally be married, have children, live happy and productive lives, and enjoy the legal benefits of being married.  Even if they weren't able to have children, they could adopt without being legally barred from it.  This is the way it should be.  This is a fair, just, and decent view of marriage.

Sadly, not all of the US's laws on marriage are fair, just, and decent.  There's still an ongoing struggle to allow same-sex partners to marry.   The arguments against gay marriage are primarily on religious grounds.  People argue that God made the sexes in a certain way, and to allow marriage between people of the same sex is a violation of his will.  They argue that allowing gays to marry is an assault on traditional, heterosexual marriage.  Because homosexual marriages cannot produce children, such unions should not be allowed. 

These arguments are just as absurd as they were when they were made against mixed-race marriages.  Just as the race of a couple has no bearing on their ability to form a stable, happy, enriching, long-lasting union, neither does the sex of the couple.  I'm sure there are thousands of same-sex couples living together in loving, stable relationships here in the US.  I know one couple here in Michigan who have been together for over 20 years. Unfortunately, they don't enjoy the same legal benefits of marriage that I do.

The fact that the marriage cannot produce children is equally irrelevant.  I've never had children of my own.  Perhaps I can't.  I don't know, I never tried.  Should I have been prevented from getting married because my marriages wouldn't result in children? 

Same sex couples can become parents through artificial insemination for lesbian couples or adoption for gay couples.  People argue that they shouldn't be allowed to raise children because they might raise them to be gay.  First, this objection is offensive because it assumes that being gay is a bad thing.  It's simply one of the many varieties of sexual preference that humans have.  It's no more good or bad than being heterosexual.  Second, there's a lot of evidence that being homosexual is just part of who someone is.  It's like being black or white.  You don't choose it, it's just who you are.  Third, whites could object to my niece's marriage because they might raise their daughter to be "black", or blacks could make the same objection because she may be raised "white".  Since when do people's objections on how we raise our children determine the legality of our marriages?  I could object that they might raise their daughter Republican.  But I don't think they should be prevented from having children for that reason. 

Last month, New York state passed a law allowing same-sex marriages.  This is another very positive step in allowing fairness and justice in our laws concerning marriage.  I hope that one day soon, we'll have a Supreme Court decision like Loving v. Virginia or a Federal law that removes the barriers to marriage for everyone, regardless of sexual orientation.   Preventing same-sex marriage is just as bigoted and wrong as preventing mixed-race marriages.  It is complete violation of the unalienable rights of  "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness".