mcgees.org

Frequently atheist arguments, when simplified enough for a blog post, end up squarely in “Shut up, you’re not helping” territory.  And despite several misfires, I would recommend “It’s no mystery how Nonbelievers stay moral without God”, if only for the presentation of a false syllogism that seems to explain the believer’s logic:

1. If God does not exist, then there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail.
2. If there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail, then there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful.
3. If there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful, then people cannot be reasonably motivated to behave morally.
4. People should be reasonably motivated to behave morally.
Therefore,
[5]. God exists.

In these situations, I am often struck with the idea that I must be completely missing some subtlety — the conviction that in the argument, surely one of us is being a moron.  But the justifications for faith really do seem pervasively fear-based.  I run up against “If there is no guarantee that moral goodness will ultimately prevail, then there is no guarantee that moral conduct is meaningful” all the time.  My response is, “So?!”  What bearing has an idea’s ability to comfort have on an existential claim?

I must — must — be missing something.  I know there are several devoted readers of my blog of an Abrahamic bent, and I would be indebted for an explication.

The reflexive claim of religionists seems frequently to be “without the fear of damnation, I surely would rape, torture, steal, and murder.”  Really?  Seriously, have you thought this through?  If it is only the fear of divine retribution that keeps you from commiting atrocities, would you be so kind as to stay the fuck away from me and my child?  Or, at the very least, comment on this post?

I’m engaged in a frustrating but rewarding and civil conversation with a Christian, a Mr. Wade Duroe, about the nature of reality.  I have his permission to post our discussion so far (which started on The Sunny Skeptic) and to invite my readers to join the conversation.  I will thread our posts back and forth in the comments; the first several posts attributed to “wljc” are my posting with quotes of Mr. Duroe’s.

This was forwarded to me by someone who simply thought I would find it interesting, not so I could vote.  I did find it interesting:

Will NBC be surprised?
Here’s your chance to let the media know where the people stand on
our faith in God, as a nation.
NBC is taking a poll on “In God We Trust” to stay on our American
currency.
Please send this to every Christian you know so they can vote on
this important subject.
Please do it right away, before NBC takes this off the web page.
Poll is still open so you can vote.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10103521/

This is not sent for discussion, if you agree forward it, if you don’t, delete it.

By me forwarding it, you know how I feel.
I’ll bet this was a surprise to NBC.

I want you to savor the deliciousness of this for a moment.  “Please send this to every Christian you know,” it says.  “This is not sent for discussion, if you agree forward it, if you don’t, delete it.”  In other words, “Please help self-select NBC’s sample.”

Yes, straw men and fish in barrels, not all religionists are like this, etc.  Not my main point.  My main point is: please use this to become more wary of online polls of any kind.  There is probably even a law we could devise, something along the lines of “The accuracy of an online poll varies inversely w.r.t. its emotional weight.”  Yes, gotta say emotional; it’s not like there’s anything more rigorous going on.  “vi vs. emacs” is not called a religious argument for no reason.

I am left to wonder how many times the charming bigot who sent this originally voted herself.

There are plenty of people here, I estimate, who would think I completely support this article.  I am here to disown it.  It is poorly-written, confrontational, unhelpful, rude, offensive, supercilious, bitter, and useless.  You are not helping, Polly Toynbee.

I meant to publish a specific article on 30 June 2008.  Best-laid plans and all that.  So I’ll try to make up for it now.

That date is important, in that Western culture attaches high significance to century markers.  A hundred years previously, the “Tunguska Event” occurred.

Tunguska?  If you’re a fan of the X-Files, you have probably been exposed to a highly fictionalized version of the story.  An object a few tens of meters across — it could be a metallic asteroid or a piece of a traditional comet, but likely nothing else — exploded in the air above a remote area of Siberia.  It is estimated that the yield of the explosion was between ten and 15 megatons, or about one thousand Hiroshima bombs.  Yeah, big, but not uniquely big: the US and the USSR were each planning on deploying Hydrogen bombs on Real Live Human Cities several times as big.

So, it blew up in the atmosphere, whatever it was.  This area of Siberia was (and is once again) heavily wooded, and the blast is estimated to have knocked over an estimated 80 million trees (which contemporary sources allege were innocent bystanders), radially outwards, for about sixteen miles in all directions.

OK, so that was 100 years ago.  A fortuitous location for an impact, with relatively minor effects on civilization.  Which takes us to the K/T boundary.

The K/T boundary is the separation between the Cretaceous (K is for a German word) and Tertiary periods.  It is marked by unusual amounts of certain elements, such as iridium, in the geological record.  Iridium stands out because it’s rare on Earth.  Most of the planet’s allotment bound to iron while the planet was condensing and sank into the core, so big amounts in sedimentary layers tell us something important.  This deposition was caused by another impact.  If you think that we still don’t know what killed the dinosaurs, you are a victim of the time it takes for scientific data to trickle down into public school classrooms, which is about as long as it takes for money to trickle down from a tax cut for the wealthiest citizens to the proles (and, Columbus’s discovery that the world is round attesting, it has approximately the same probability).  This impact killed the dinosaurs.

The K/T boundary event: bigger.  Seriously bigger.  Really, absolutely, seriously bigger.  Instead of an object with width and breadth each equal to the length of a Mack truck, it was an object the size of Manhattan.  Seriously.  It crashed in an area near what is now the Yucatan Penninsula.  And goodbye big, expensive animals; goodbye most plants; goodbye frakking phytoplankton; hello only to tiny annoying shrewlike pests content to dig holes and venture out into the big cruel world only to snack on dead things.  The latter would be unimportant, historically, except they happen to be our grandparents.

The worldview that embraces such sudden changes is known as catastrophism.  And because some scientists (ahem, Stephen Jay Gould, ahem) get absurdly entranced by one possibility and embrace it to the exclusion of all others, very many educated Americans think that the history of the world proceeds in fits and starts, going so far as to think the Cambrian explosion was actually special for a reason other than historical accident (I don’t want to go off on the tangent, so, Wikipedia’s entry on the Cambrian explosion, which I have not yet read.)

That the history of the world proceeds in fits and starts is unlikely.  It’s unlikely for a number of reasons, that (again) I don’t want to get into, that I largely understand and creationists (whether or not they call themselves Intelligent Design — uh — ists?) don’t.  Richard Dawkins thinks it is a capital-letter Bad Thing for scientists to entertain this hypothesis in public.  He thinks this for the same reason he thinks The Brights movement is a good thing, which is that we should be artificially buttressing the apparent number of people that mostly agree with him.

It’s not honest, intellectually, but it’s not totally crazy.  Amidst the blatant incomprehension and more blatant lies of the creationists, there comes the gem that is represented by the line “See, even evolutionists don’t agree about the ‘facts’ of evolution!!!”  Yes, the multiple bangs are implied in their contentions thereof.

The logical response to this takes a bit more time than pretending that all evolutionists agree, but is a much more convincing argument.  Basically, it goes “I may not be completely right about the details of evolution, but a talking snake in a tree is not even close.”  Think about it.  “God created the universe” is not the default position, and even if 100% of your claims about the truth of evolution (in actuality, the proportion of true claims among creationists is around negative 8.3%) are valid, that doesn’t help your case.  Seriously.  This is logically true.  If you think that your “received Word” is, shall we say, gospel truth, and you must only find inconsistencies in other arguments to support your own, you’ve given the game away.  You’ve begged the question in the real, useful meaning of the phrase.  There are as many creation myths as there are historical tribes, and why should yours have special position when “turtles all the way down” doesn’t?

I didn’t start this as another harangue of religion.  So let’s get back to the topic at hand.

When Shoemaker-Levy impacted Jupiter, it gave us pause.  Pause, because that’s really frakking close to us as such things go, and it was unbelievably huge.  Velociraptors — and I’ll entertain arguments of whether this is, on the whole, a good or bad thing — can’t and don’t much worry about impact scenarios.  We do, as humans.  We were steeled by this, and we raised hundreds of millions of dollars to deal with this possible threat, and spent it on really shitty movies.  Like you do.  Fun stuff.

So, next time a batter (Rays?  Seriously, the Rays?  The most common response I’ve heard is “There’s a team called the Rays?”) gets beaned by a ball, think about how much more it would hurt if the pitcher could throw at twenty thousand motherfrakking miles per hour, and a baseball weighed something like a battleship, because that’s what we’re talking about for Tunguska.

And not that the difference would matter much to a Rays batter, but what if it was the size of Manhattan?  Seriously, someone might lose an eye.

mcgees.org has recently been accepted into the Atheist Blogroll, an international list of blogs on atheist topics written by atheists (no, this is not special, and took almost no effort on my part to accomplish.)  A random selection of twenty-five from the list are visible in my sidebar at right (if you’re viewing on the actual site and not on a feed reader.)

If you are interested to join, visit Deep Thoughts here.

Visit the following links to view posts on mcgees.org on the topics of atheism and religion.

On April 2nd, Representative Monique Davis of the Illinois Legislature, during a session, condemned Jewish activist Rob Sherman for “destroying what this state was built upon”, shouted in open session, told him to “Get out of that seat, you have no right to be there!”, and commented, “What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous.”

Oh, wait.  Did I say Jewish?  I meant Atheist.  Brad Sherman is atheist, an activist, and an American.

If Sherman had been Jewish, the airwaves would not have stopped shrieking the story for the last six days.  Monique Davis, a black, female legislator, went all 1841-Mississippi on Sherman’s ass, and there was barely a murmur in the media.

Some of you who get your news entirely online will contend “Oh, everyone covered that, Josh!”  What I want the rest of you to do is, if this is the first, or the first detailed, report you have encountered of what happened, to post, “I didn’t know about that.”  You with me?  The usual suspects can go ahead and tell me I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, and I’m just asking the rest of you to be honest about this.  Did this get the coverage it would have if, for instance, an Atheist legislator (Ha!  Must be a fucking incredible duck hunter!) had told a 71-year-old black woman that she had no business in a legislative session?

(You can see it buried deeply in the Chicago Tribune.  I know the Web has a way of flattening sites, but just note what column it appeared under, when, and where.)

This was going to be a single sentence in the next post, but it sort of grew out of hand.  If you’re of an Abrahamic bent, and want to believe that I’m not really an asshole, stop reading.  Here’s your chance.

Still with me?  Are you sure you want to be here?

OK, thanks.  Regarding the shared bits of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, etc., here it is, in second person:

I believe that your God was the favorite tribal deity of a polytheistic, nomadic, historically insignificant Bronze Age people living in North Africa and the Near East.  Through a bizarre historical accident, a tiny messianic doomsday cult of this people was adopted as the state religion of the most powerful empire on the planet, despite the utter failure of any of the doomsday prophecies to transpire in the allotted time.

I believe your shared “testament” is a heterogeneous anthology of self-aggrandizing revisionist history, stolen legal codes, institutionalized bigotry, justifications for ethnic cleansing, “Just So” stories, the ravings of the mentally ill, census data, a sprinkling of common sense, and some truly beautiful poetry and children’s literature, all of which was rolled together and authorship attributed to a deity, which means to many of you that it has to be 100% factually accurate, even when it’s internally inconsistent or demonstrably wrong.

I believe the premise and existence of the modern state of Israel is at least as bizarre as if my family declared ownership of the British Isles, invaded, subjugated the citizenry, imposed martial law, renamed the nation “Mordor”, and declared war on Western Europe.

I believe that were we to argue theology, I’d argue to the point where we agreed that your god is undetectable, untestable, unpredictable, inelegant, unnecessary, paradoxical, and at least one of impotent, malicious, and completely incomprehensible, not to mention just plain weird, at which point I’d consider the topic not worth any further thought, you’d declare ineffability a feature rather than a bug, and I’d look at you as if you turned into a walrus in front of my eyes.

I believe people who “sort of” believe in God, “don’t really think about it”, “guess they do”, or find it the path of least resistance, are pussies leading unexamined lives.

I will, however, fight tooth and nail for your right to engage in your superstitions in your own home or normally-taxed buildings, or very quietly and personally in public.  I believe it is your right to live an unexamined life, in the same way that it is my right not to exercise, even though I know failing to will contribute to my early death.  I get it, kinda: we all have mental blocks.  I will even tolerate you indoctrinating your own children, although I really wish you wouldn’t, in the same way I wish Jews would stop mutilating the genitals of their male infants and Mexicans would stop piercing the ears of their female infants.

So there.

The “asshole” in the tagging of this post refers to me, by the way.

So, I’m looking at my referrer logs (or, in Apache-speak, “referer logs”) and I see this page on a site called StumbleUpon.com: http://www.stumbleupon.com/refer.html.  A page that clearly couldn’t have referred anyone to me.  So it’s spam, right?

Well, technically.  StumbleUpon is, in fact, forging the referrer header.  But the mass behind it is real, and the referrals are real.

It turns out to be a social-network Alexa.  And it’s really cool, and highly reliable.  You download a toolbar, tell it your interests, hit the “Stumble!” button, and find great sites — great sites that people with similar interests liked.

I have to go to bed, but I’ve been having too much fun stumbling on “Atheist/Agnostic” sites.  They are wonderful.  Haven’t hit a bad one yet.  And that’s only one interest category I’ve explored (Maybe the rest aren’t as good.  But I expect they are.)

Check it out.  It’s really good.  And check out this, this, and this for fun.

The page people were raving about at mcgees.org was Postal Cancel Art, by the way.

The Theocratic Inclinations of the Republican Electorate.  From The Nation.

Truthdig - Reports - Robert Scheer: ‘Anti-Christian Conspirators’ Slay DeLay.  Ah, if only we could take credit for DeLay’s downfall. That would have been a major coup. Instead of, say, something akin to the laws of physics.

Myths about the sanctity of life, or of consciousness, cut both ways. They may be useful in erecting barriers (against euthanasia, against capital punishment, against abortion, against eating meat) to impress the unimaginative, but at the price of offensive hypocrisy or ridiculous self-deception among the more enlightened.

Absolutist barriers, like the Maginot Line, seldom do the work they were designed for….  Surely it would be better to try to foster an appreciation for the nonabsolutist, nonintrinsic, nondichotomized grounds for moral concern that can co-exist with our increasing knowledge of the inner workings of that most amazing machine, the brain. The moral arguments on both sides of the issues of capital punishment, abortion, eating meat, and experimenting on nonhuman animals, for instance, are raised to a higher, more appropriate standard when we explicitly jettison the myths…. — Daniel Dennett.

Discuss, if you are so inclined.

Truth be told, I mostly subscribe to Free Inquiry for Dawkins’s column and in spite of Kurtz’s. The latter is one of the most simple-minded voices in Secular Humanism today, but the former has such an intensely biting and ferocious wit and such reckless abandon to state what he believes that it’s worth the subscription price on its own, and makes up for the boneheadedness the rest of the magazine frequently achieves.

Two gems from the most recent issue:

“I have never found the problem of evil very persuasive … There seems to be no obvious reason to presume that your God will be good… [T]he “jealous God” of the Old Testament is surely one of the nastiest, most truly evil characters in all fiction.”

“The world is divided into those who can see that the capacity to comfort has no bearing on the truth of a cosmic claim and those who cannot.”

I was a bit skeptical, and … annoy[ed] at the possibility that the word bright would be used to imply that we are smarter than other people. Yet, reading some of the essays posted on the brights’ web site quickly changed my mind. After all, not all “gay” people are gay in the sense of being happy, easy-going fellows, right? — Massimo  Pigliucci

And I sigh.

Look, Massimo, Richard, Daniel: you’re not helping. I know you feel crapped upon — most atheists do — but we’re not going to increase tolerance and education by referring to ourselves as smarties or clevers, even if we were to contend that “by saying I’m a clever, I’m not saying I am clever.”  You cannot just hijack terms with unflattering antonyms because it makes you feel warm and fuzzy.  That just puts people on the defensive, and it’s frankly offensive.

There are two main reasons to adopt an umbrella term for people currently identifying as atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, secular humanists, and rationalists, and neither seem particularly beneficial. The more reasonable one is to promote a sense of self-identity, using a “positive” term (and I mean that both linguistically and approbationally.) I understand the draw of having a desirable term with which to self-label, but it seems clannish and petty. The second, worse reason seems to be apparent inflation of our ranks, trying to look like a larger minority, which is a bit sneaky.

Massimo Pigliucci and Daniel Dennett (they’re the less shrill ones, if you’re keep track) admitted wariness in initially embracing the term. Go with your instincts, guys.

(Note 31 October 2002: This came about a bit more harshly than it should have.  Sorry about that.  I have left it up unedited as it has already been discussed at QuickTopic, where a good discussion is going on.)

From the Christian Charity Department of mcgees.org:

If you don’t like Christianity, [t]hen why don’t all of you leave America, this country was founded by Christians for Christians. And if you don’t like it then go to a Godless heathen nation that agrees with your retard tinged philosophy. Their are way more of us Christians than you losers. Their is NO separation of church and state and you heathens will lose. Thankfully you are old and I hope you get a painful disease like rectal cancer and die a slow painful death, so you can meet your God, SATAN . . . .

There’s more.  You can view other hate mail filled with intolerant diatribes, racist, misogynist, and anti-gay messages, and anonymous death threats.

I am told frequently by Christians that while Christians might say hateful things and perform horrific acts, this is not the fault of Christianity.  Besides echoes of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, it is simply untrue.  Racism, intolerance of homosexuality, misogyny, and death threats are what the Bible excel at.  The book has taken these sentiments to dizzying heights.  Yes, I know that the Bible also attributes to Jesus the sentiment that we should love our neighbors.  But accepting that in light of other Biblical tales requires either a very diseased notion of love or a very limiting definition of neighbor.

Talk some time to a mainstream Christian and try to discern his or her criteria for determing whether something in the Bible is custom, a fallacy of man attributed to God, or truly God’s word.  A woman wearing men’s clothes is an abomination to God: that’s just a custom, you will be told, especially by a woman in slacks and a shirt.  We’re allowed to keep slaves: whoops, that’s a fallacy of man attributed to God, because we know slaveholding is wrong.  You must believe in God or you will go to hell: tada, that one’s God.

If the Christian is a non-fundamentalist with even an gram of education or understanding of physical processes, ask about the six day creation story.  Umm, must be a customary story, or a metaphor of some sort.  A woman who commits adultery, or a son who disrespects his parents, should be killed: yikes, that’s a fallacy of man, because, after all, God is Love.  One should love one’s neighbor as oneself: yep, God.

A pattern emerges quite rapidly.  If your conversation partner has already decided something is right, that’s the will of God.  If he or she has already decided something is wrong, that’s the will of man.  And if he or she has decided something is absurd, that’s custom.  In a way you have to respect the logic of Orthodox Jews more, who follow jaw-dropping, staggeringly pointless rules such as a hamburger being OK to eat, and a grilled cheese sandwich being OK to eat, but a cheeseburger being an abomination to God.  For the mainstream Christians, it’s all ad hoc justification.  It’s just each person’s prejudice given selective support by a deity.  (I’m not, by the way, saying Christians should logically follow kosher laws.  In their “New Testament” kosher laws are explicitly overturned.  “Yes, I know that eating pork was an abomination last Tuesday,” God says, “but it’s not any longer.”)

Rather than send hate-filled, death-threat-laden, and badly spell-checked missives to people in their communities, this group of Christians should grow spines, stop threatening that their invisible friend will beat people up, and begin to come to grips with their own hate, bigotry, and closed-mindedness.  We are all neighbors, folks.  Put down your Bible, unload your shotgun, and start acting like it.

I was reading the opinions of a well-informed poster at a technical site, a man who signs himself by the somewhat pompous title “software craftsman” (presumably contrasting a homespun, artistic, pride-in-one’s-work approach to all the ‘engineers’ doing impersonal number grinding.)  His posts were good, though, and I was sufficiently curious about the “software craftsman” bit to visit the homepage he linked to.

The gentleman is one Eric Sink.  The name did not originally spur my memory, but reading his About Me page I learned he was the original architect (er, craftsman) of the AbiWord project, a terrifically important and impressive semi-clone of Microsoft Word for Linux.  I have used this program extensively, and finding this, thought I would read more on his site.  I turned my attention to his Weblog.  On the navigation bar to the left of the page, there was a link to a post called Rebuttal to Richard Dawkins.

The thing I can truly thank Mr. Sink for is the pointer to a Guardian editorial by Richard Dawkins, published four days after the World Trade Center attacks.  Although I am an avid reader of The Guardian (as regular readers of this blog will know) I had somehow missed this article.  I read the editorial before reading Mr. Sink’s response.

Dawkin’s writing was (as usual) powerful and lucid, and I admired his bravery in discussing something that I have been somewhat reticent to discuss in mixed company: that it could be said to be an accident that the hijackers were fundamentalist Muslims.  In describing the zealous brainwashed state of the hijackers and the origins of this state, the reader is keenly aware that the words could apply to zealots of any denomination.  I think the his main thesis may be summarized in this excerpt:

Promise a young man that death is not the end and he will willingly cause disaster

Could we develop a biological guidance system with the compliance and dispensability of a pigeon but with a man’s resourcefulness and ability to infiltrate plausibly?  What we need, in a nutshell, is a human who doesn’t mind being blown up.  He’d make the perfect on-board guidance system.  But suicide enthusiasts are hard to find. Even terminal cancer patients might lose their nerve when the crash was actually looming.  Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? … [C]ouldn’t we sucker them into believing that they are going to come to life again afterwards? …

It’s a tall story, but worth a try.  You’d have to get them young, though… If death is final, a rational agent can be expected to value his life highly and be reluctant to risk it… [I]t would pay us mightily to understand where that courage came from.

It came from religion.  To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns.  Do not be surprised if they are used.

I half forgot that there was an attempted rebuttal waiting for me, so I went back to see what the software craftsman had to say.  The tone of the attempted rebuttal was rather insulting, but I expect that Richard Dawkins is used to this, even if it offends me.  In his third paragraph, for instance, Mr. Sink writes “Beginning in paragraph eleven, may I assume that your local village idiot finished the article for you?”  Later in the essay he writes “As my eyes glazed over, I found myself unable to proceed past paragraph thirteen.”  I intend to extend to Mr. Sink two courtesies that he found unnecessary to grant Dr. Dawkins: politeness, and bothering to read a short article to its completion.  Let me begin with one of Mr. Sink’s statements:

First, you categorize all religions together, as if all people of spiritual beliefs are equally capable of the heinous acts committed last week… Did you really intend to dump Orthodox Jews, Christians, Mormons and others into the same contrived pigeonhole?

Well, yes (by the way, this is stated explicitly in the unread last paragraph of the essay.)  Breaking the argument into steps might give us a good place to start.

1. Valuing one’s own life is natural (except perhaps in extreme cases in which the life of one’s offspring is more likely to bring about survival of the agent’s genes; consider the fabled lioness protecting her cubs.)
2. Therefore, external education is necessary to have a rational agent select death.
3. The hijackers received an education that taught that death is not final and led them to choose death.
4. Therefore, this education devalues life in the eyes of the agent.

It follows that all religions that offer such an education devalue life to one degree or another.  Mr. Sink’s insertion of the word “equally”, as in “equally capable of the heinous acts”, is his introduction and does not appear in the original argument.  Sink maintains that the

willingness of an individual to sacrifice their own life for a cause is not evidence of the cheapness of that life.  On the contrary, martyrs understand the value of that which they are giving up.

One clarification: all that is necessary is that the value of an agent’s life is devalued in the agent’s eyes.  However, the main point that martyrs are making a considered personal sacrifice is not borne out by the evidence in this case, nor indeed in most cases of religious martyrdom.  In a non-theistic framework, or a theistic framework that teaches life to be finite, such acts may evidence altruism.  But this is not necessarily (and not likely) the case if the agent is expecting a reward.  An argument that an “eternal life” argument does not contribute to a person’s likelihood to martyr himself defies credulity.  Mr. Sink writes:

You offer no indication that you understand any of the actual intended functions of religion in society.  The world’s religions have brought hope and assistance to billions of individuals for several millennia.

To an extent I agree with Mr. Sink’s second claim here.  It is true that the role of religion at all times and in all places has not been to create homicidal sociopaths.  For instance, it has frequently served as a rapidly-instilled substitute for education (e.g., “allow your fields to lay fallow because you sin against a deity otherwise” versus “allow your fields to lay fallow because this will increase crop yields.”)  It has served as justification for social support by a community.  It has served as a convenient method to instill personal morality, using inexpensive fear as a motivator rather than time- and thought-intensive analysis and deliberation.  It has inevitably and largely unintentionally been passed as a meme along with other elements of group knowledge (”this is how to speak, this is how to make a fire, this is how not to piss of a fierce creature in the sky”).  But the only point where these considerations come into play is in a cost-benefit analysis, namely, “Are the benefits of religion worth the evident costs?”  It is not the case that Dr. Dawkins does not recognize the broader impact of religion in the world; his cost-benefit analysis convinces him that the world would be a better place without it.

Consider the following also:

You  identified yourself as a person who does not know the difference between religion and faith. And, you appear to be a person who is afraid of both.

I admit to some confusion here myself.  However I am in some company.  The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the terms as follows:

faith: belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion; firm belief in something for which there is no proof

religion: commitment or devotion to religious faith or observance; a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices

Considering that the terms are mutually referential, the question is far from settled.  I have re-read Sink’s article and I cannot determine which he is eschewing and which he wishes to be associated with.  Would it be too obvious to note that “you disagree with it, you must be afraid of it” is a less-than-impressive argument?

On to another argument.  Those versed in formal logic will recognize the term Argumentum ad baculum, an appeal to force.  This is the classic but reprehensible technique showcased in “I’ve got a knife to your throat, still disagree with me?” arguments.  So when Mr. Sink writes the following, his argument inevitably deteriorates from unsubstantiated and rude to simple bullying:

I’ll defer discussion of [an afterlife] for the time being, but I would enjoy the opportunity to discuss this concept with you in person.  Let’s meet over coffee in a thousand years or so.  I’ll be living in a large city that is extremely well-lit.  If you need directions to get there, you should probably ask me soon, because you might want to get started on the journey.

The reader will surely recognize an irony here:  Religion is not here to brainwash people nor manipulate them with tales of a glorious afterlife.  Religion is not violent.  If you do not accept this, you will burn in hell forever, whereas I will be treated to an eternal life of luxury.

I cannot credit Mr. Sink with the invention of brute-force, logically fallacious arguments.  But we would be doing ourselves a disservice not to notice one here.