Thin Ice

I used to be amazed at how the old masters could paint such life-like people. Then I saw this doc by Hockney putting foward a very convincing theory that these painters' sudden abilty to paint with almost photographic accuracy was down to the use of mirrors projecting images onto the canvas to be traced. In a way, they were the first photos.

Someone commented that religion as been the primary source of inspiration for creative types. Its true. In fact, all myths have. And I think that tells us a lot about what they really are.

Unlike artists, scientists have never been directly assisted in their work by their belief. Yes, their desire to cure people may have been inspired by worship, but the nuts and bolts of science has come from rigorous intellectual and logical study and scientific practice.

The problem with the logic of religious thinking (and supposed intellectuals like Polkinghorne and Mitton) is this:

We have this jigsaw puzzle. This puzzle is so difficult it would be impossible for us to finish it in your lifetime. Even in a thousand lifetimes. But if we really dedicate ourselves, we might just get to fit two pieces together.

Religious people aren't interested in that. There's no way they're going to spend their whole lives just to fit two bits of sky together. So they play around with the pieces for a few days, then decide on instinct what they think the picture is. Quickly, they set about arranging the pieces to fit the picture they have in their mind. Because they've convinced themselves this is the picture, they're blind to the mess they are making with the puzzle. To them, it looks beautiful. To the rest of us, it's just a mess.

That's why I can't trust "facts" about Jesus which are supposedly "beyond dispute".

There's several bits of written evidence describing King Arthur or someone who may have been the inspiration for him. The fact that the myth of King Arthur didn't take off in the way the myth of Jesus did, is why we don't have thousands of written accounts of "what people saw him do". But written evidence is not enough to say "beyond dispute". That's why we have archeology.

I don't care what Mitton says, there is nothing a historian could say about Jesus which would be "beyond dispute", except that he was the central figure for one of the biggest religions the world has ever seen.

Alvar Ellegård thinks the story of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified by Pilate, was a fictional construction.

Most accounts of Jesus are wrapped up in the mass-hysteria that drives religous belief, so we can't be sure exactly what these people saw, or what they heard other people say they saw.

Have you ever witnessed a witch hunt? I have. I nearly joined in but saw it for what it was in the nick of time. The force and power and conviction of the people involved was scary. Simply due to a charming person saying bad things about a person everyone loved to hate, they were ready to do physical harm. And these were hippies.

Hitler did the same things as Mitton. He took bits and pieces of "fact" and put them together in a compelling way to persuade people to believe in National Socialism.

When people decide to go skating on thin ice, if they want other less reckless types to follow, they go to great lengths to persuade them the ice is solid as a rock.

Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy say: "The Messiah was expected to be a historical, not a mythical, savior. It was inevitable, therefore, that the Jesus story would have to develop a quasi-historical setting. And so it did. What had started as a timeless myth encoding perennial teachings now appeared to be a historical account of a once-only event in time. From this point it was unavoidable that sooner or later it would be interpreted as historical fact. Once it was, a whole new type of religion came into being - a religion based on history not myth, on blind faith in supposed events rather than on a mystical understanding of mythical allegories, a religion of the Outer Mysteries without the Inner Mysteries, of form without content, of belief without Knowledge." (The Jesus Mysteries, p. 207)

But nobody wants to believe the old masters cheated.

Logical Debate

I'm growing increasingly convinced it is virtually impossible to have a rational debate with someone about their religion.

The stupid ones just ram home their belief with all the debating finesse of a hurd of stampeding cattle.

The smart ones develop their argument based on sweeping statements, wild speculation and very creative interpretation but wrap it all up in a cloud of suedo-intellectual language (if you can work out what they're trying to say, you're probably too smart to believe in God anyway), then stick rigidly to it, no matter if you completely and utterly destroy their ideas with the application of sound logic. No matter that their argument glows with falsity. No matter that their assertions are never backed up by the athoratitive evidence.

I really wouldn't care, if it wasn't that the civilised world creaks under the weight of their blinkered ignorance and prejudice.

The Bloody Hands Of Atheists

I had a reply to my first arguments against John Polkinghorne's statements regarding Dawking's CH4 documentary. Actually, it was from his spokesman, Nicholas Beale...

"Firstly, at an empirical level, these 4 regimes must represent a good 85% of the atheist regimes (weighted by number of citizens) in recorded history (the atheist phase of the French Revolution may well account for another 2-3% which was about as bloodthirsty). Atheist regimes are actually quite rare, representing say 20% of the regimes (weighted by citizens) in recorded history. The only theist regime I can think of which practiced/allowed mass murder of its citizens on a comparable relative scale was in Rwanda (representing say 0.1% of regimes). So at an emprical level, the association between atheist regimes and mass murder is very strong - far worse than smoking and cancer. Of course your agrument about Father Christmas is bogus, because no regime, whether atheist or not, has been led by people who believe in Father Christmas.

But what is the mechanism? Well Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot all claimed to be Marxists and Marxism "the science of history" was the essential underpinning ideology that allowed them to perpetrate their massive crimes. The essence of Marxism is dialectical materialism and a denial of the existence of God - indeed Marxism was specifically developed as an anti-Christian philosophy. Hitler's Nazi-ism was admittedly far more confused than Marxism, a sort of anti-Marxism which was based on the popularised Darwinism of Haekel (the Dawkins of his day) and picked up the widely-held German view that "survival of the fittest" was a scientific and moral principle (and that, of course, the Germans were the fittest!). But more fundamentally, if you don't believe in God it is very hard to believe in a morality that will constrain you when you have an enormous amount of power. Christian leaders, however powerful, know that they are "under God" and that they do not have ulimate power, but are themselves under judgement. Atheists, manifestly, do not. An absence of constraints on the abuse of power leads, understandably, to an abuse of power.

Incidentlly, these 'darwinian' views were very common in German intellectual an military circles in the early 1900s, and very widely held by the German General Staff. It was this that shocked Vernon Kellogg, a Stanford professor who was posted to the headquarters of the German general staff During the period of American neutrality in World War I and was shocked to find German military leaders, sometimes with the Kaiser present, supporting the war with an "evolutionary rationale." They did so with "a particularly crude form of natural selection, defined as inexorable, bloody battle." - his subsequent book Headquarters Nights helped bring the US into the war.

I obviously don't suggest that all atheists are immoral - many smokers do not die of cancer. But atheism and power is an exeptionally dangerous mixture.

I'm glad to learn that you don't consider humans to be animals - most atheists do. And that view does lead to the rivers of blood of the 20th C - not in all cases but in enough to cause massive concern, and over 100M deaths."

I have replied:

"Thank you for your reply. I must disagree with most of your claims, however.

Like with Stalin, it was the fanatical implementation of Communist ideologies by Mao, Pol Pot and the French Revolutionary leaders which caused the deaths of millions. I would also argue it was partly the intollerance and abuse of power by state-controlling religious organisations in these regions which caused such extreme reactions to them.

It is questionable whether Nazism was atheistic at all. I'm told the Nazi Wehrmacht uniforms included belt buckles that said "God With Us" in German. Hitler said in one speech "The Party, as such, stands for positive Christianity..." and spoke positively about Christianity in other speeches. Nazism was at least semi-religious, with Hitler himself as a God-like figurehead. They certainly were not "militant atheists", as you claim. That idea is simply false. That they took ideas of natural selection and twisted them for their own purposes has nothing to do with atheism. In fact, Christian "Intelligent Design" supporters are doing the very same thing.

But I don't argue, like Dawkins, that religion is the cause of brutality, although many millions have died at the hands of Muslim and Christian fanatics over the last two thousand years. And certainly, murder has been committed purely in the name of Jesus and Muhammed. What I mean by that is - if you took away the Christian belief of the Crusaders, for example, it is certain they would not have travelled to the Middle East to kill people.

However, if Stalin had believed in God it is not certain whether millions would still have died as a result of his actions.

It is also uncertain how many "Christian" leaders have actually believed in God. As a leader, it is not wise to express your own personal belief if it is contrary to popular opinion. We don't don't know how many kept their skeptisism to themselves.

If we're going to make claims, we need to base those claims on facts. The facts are that deaths have been caused directly by the actions of religious fanatics. People have been executed, murdered and wars have been fought, purely for theological reasons. There have been some murders comitted for purely atheist reasons, but they are extremely rare. I certainly know of any state persecutions comitted purely in the name of atheism. Do you?

You have also neglected to talk about the First World War. Britain, France, Russia, Austria and Germany were at that time Christian states, yet they led their people into one of the most inhumane, sickening, brutal and bloody conflicts of all time.

You say "I'm glad to learn that you don't consider humans to be animals - most atheists do. And that view does lead to the rivers of blood of the 20th C - not in all cases but in enough to cause massive concern, and over 100M deaths."

Do you have any evidence for these claims? Or are they simply pure speculation. Have atheists been interviewed to discover what the majority think? Nazis thought some races were sub-human. So did many Christians of the Victorian era.

I think if we are to make claims, we need to stick to he facts, don't we?"