Book Review: A Manual for Creating Atheists

    You hear it all the time.  “Faith is a virtue.”  “You’ve just got to have faith.”  “Without faith there is no meaning.”  Peter Boghossian disagrees.  He takes great pains to separate the term ‘faith’ from the term ‘hope.’  And to clarify what atheism is.  Faith is the belief in something without evidence for that something, or ‘pretending to know things you don’t know.’  Whereas, like me, he sees atheist as meaning ‘there is insufficient evidence to belief in X deity.’  It isn’t a dogma or a belief system, just as a Buddhist doesn’t have a specific set of beliefs about there not being a Thor.  With this book Boghossian provides some handy hints on how to deal with those who claim to know things they don’t have know.  Unlike some before, he does not target religion, which he sees more as a social structure, but faith itself.  The root cause, and not the symptom.

    As he puts it, ‘faith claims are knowledge claims,’ statements about how things are (the world is 6000 years old, lightening was sent from Zeus, the Emperor of Japan is a god, Muhammad rode a flying horse, etc.), thus must be treated as such.  And when they are baseless, they must be challenged.  He also calls out relativists, who claim that other cultures either can’t or shouldn’t be subject to judgment or challenge.  Like Sam Harris, he makes the case that relativism isn’t a path to success.  Pluralism, the coming together and peaceful coexistence of many cultures is good, multiculturalism, having different rules for different peoples is bad.  Many ‘academic leftists’ seem to be willing to accept absolutely anything in the name of tolerance.  But both Boghossian and Harris have called them out on this sort of behavior.  If you claim that throwing acid in a little girl’s face or shooting her in the back of the head because she tried to read a book is OK, then you’re either A) delusional or B) profoundly evil.  And excusing this sort of thing because it is consistent with someone’s religion is immoral.

    Like Sean Faircloth in his book Attack of the Theocrats, he also calls out religious exemptions from the normal rule of law that applies to everyone else.  Be it taxes or bad behavior, too often faith based groups are given a free ride and legal protections they should not have.  But we are constantly bombarded with the message that criticizing faith is tantamount to racism and other egregious behaviors.  Because, as Boghossian says, ideas are now given a respect they shouldn’t have.  Attacking a person should be wrong, but attacking an idea should be encouraged.  Ideas deserve only as much respect as they can retain under assault.

    Boghossian takes on many of the common arguments for faith and against atheism, from the Kalam Cosmological Argument to Pascal’s Wager.  He gives categories for where people are on their journey away from faith, from those who have never been exposed to alternate ideas to those who are questioning, and beyond.  He doesn’t suggest that with one or two questions, one can make someone abandon years of indoctrination, nor necessarily should they.  But by presenting Socratic questions, by making a person take a moment to examine why as much as what they believe, you may have done a lot to break the spell.  As he brings up, while many people’s journey to faith is quick (a traumatic experience, for example), people’s journey away from it is often long and carefully thought out.  I think of my own, and I know that the journey away from faith for me took a very, very long time.  There were fitful leaps, but the whole process must have taken more than twenty years.

    Boghossian also encourages us to read up on various schools of thought.  He suggests reading the works of religious scholars like William Lane Craig and peddlers of what he terms ‘deepities’ like Deepak Chopra.  Listen to what others say, question them, challenge them.  Don’t insult the person, don’t try to make a person feel dumb or small.  Just be that voice of descent.  Ultimately the journey away from superstition and faith is a personal one, and should be encouraged and nurtured, but not forced.  And of course, don’t pretend to know what you don’t know.  Not knowing is perfectly OK.  Knowing that one doesn’t know is the beginning of the journey.  And in a life without faith, the journey is what it’s all about.  At least, that’s what mine is about.  I can’t speak for others.

A Manual for Creating Atheists
Author: Peter Boghossian
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
ISBN: 9781939578150 (I read this as an ebook)

-Matt

Book Review: Attack of the Theocrats

“Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity.  It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven…it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses.”  -John Adams

    I’ve felt a change in the air as the years have passed.  As a boy, there was a great deal of hope and longing for a future of technological advancement, world peace, and a reign of compassion and reason.  Science and evidence based reasoning were the tools we would use to build a brighter future.  It was in the literature, on the big and small screen.  We were going to space, we were curing illness, we were learning about our past (and learning from it), and we were going to clean up our planet and make things right.  But, as I entered high school in the early 90s, I got my first taste of something.  Something that had been building in the shadows of American politics for a long time.  A conscious, directed effort on the part of a faction of American Christianity had been using their considerable wealth and grass roots energy to erode basic tenants of American law, democracy, and our nation’s very spirit.  Why were we abandoning science?  Why did we start denying the facts of evolution, of climate change, of our founding fathers, and so much more?  Why were established and understood maters of science being cast aside left and right?  Why was innovation and intellectual curiosity held up as a thing of ridicule?  When did trying to get an education become ‘elitist?’  When did fair taxes, chipping in, taking care of your fellow man, coming to a consensus, etc. become ‘socialist?’

“I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law representing establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and state.” -Thomas Jefferson

“I believe that God wants me to be president.” -George Bush

    Sean Faircloth’s book goes into details on how this shift happened, who was behind it, what their goals were and are, and what can be done to stop them, and to wrestle the future of America back from religious extremists who want to create a theocracy in direct contradiction to the principles of the Founding Fathers and the desire of the ‘man on the streets.’  It’s a frightening, clarion call to action against the very real, and very dangerous element within our government and our civilization, who are putting our lives, the lives of our children, and the very future of our species and our planet in jeopardy.

“Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.” -Thomas Jefferson

    Using plenty of examples, and directly calling out egregious offences against the Constitution and Bill of Rights on the part of those who so vocally claim their sanction, Faircloth does a fine job of highlighting individuals and organizations that all Americans should fight against in the name of freedom and law.  Law.  That thing that has made our country strong in the past.  Law.  The tool of justice.  Law.  The thing that keeps safe the poor and the rich, the old and the young, the minority and the majority.

And this from a very religious man.

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of.  My own mind is my own church.” -Thomas Paine

    If you’re worried about the direction a small number of backward looking extremists are trying to drag our country, you should take a look at this book.  If you want to see America take the lead in science and innovation again, you should read this book.  If you are tired of people claiming to be for ‘small government’ while they simultaneously try to legislate every aspect of your personal life, you should read this book.  If you’re tired of sending your tax money to support religious organizations you don’t belong to or support in any way, you should read this book.  If you're sick of hearing how our founding fathers wanted America to be a Christian nation, in spite of all the mountains of written works by those same founders to the contrary, you should read this book.  Tired of government sanctioned religion that flies in the face of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, changing our money and even our Pledge of Allegiance, in the name of their particular beliefs, you should read this book.  Are you angry to see Jefferson and Madison’s ‘separation of Church and State’ attacked time and again, except when used as an excuse for not paying taxes on massive megachurch incomes and financial double-dealings?  Are you sick to your stomach at the idea that our children are tortured and allowed to die in the name of ancient superstitions?  You should read this book.  Faircloth looks at specific examples and general trends, and shows how wrong the attempted Theocrats are, and how anti-American they really are.  Men and women who wrap themselves in the flag, while they soil everything it stands for.  Read this book.

“There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature.  Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness.” -George Washington


Attack of the Theocrats
Author: Sean Faircloth
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
ISBN: 9780984493241

(I read this as an ebook, which you can get for the Nook or Kindle)

-Matt