File under "Atheists never kill in the name of atheism."

This is a tragedy, but it catches the eye because of the habit of New Atheists to delight in the evil committed by individual Christians - as if the lasting capacity for such evil was not proof, and a core teaching, of Christianity.

Killer of 3 UNC-Chapel Hill Muslim Students Was Hardcore Anti-Religion Atheist Progressive

A horrific triple homicide was committed yesterday in Chapel Hill, NC, as three Muslim students were apparently targeted by a deranged anti-religion progressive.

The News & Observer reports:

Police charged a Chapel Hill man Wednesday with first-degree murder in the deaths of three Muslim students in a quiet neighborhood near Meadowmont just south of N.C. 54.Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, is being held in the Durham County Jail on three counts of first-degree murder.

Hicks is accused of shooting his Finley Forest neighbors, Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, and his wife Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and Abu-Salha’s sister, Razan Abu-Salha, 19, of Raleigh.

Barakat was a doctoral student in UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Dentistry. The sisters were N.C. State University students. Chapel Hill police found all three victims dead at the scene, after responding to a report of gunshots on Summerwalk Circle at 5:11 p.m. Tuesday.

The neighborhood, adjacent to the Friday Center, is mostly rental apartments and modest condominiums. It rarely appears in reports of crime in Chapel Hill. Police worked early into the morning trying to piece together what happened. Police have not offered a motive for the shootings.

[UPDATE: Chapel Hill police are now saying the shooting may be related to a parking dispute. Thanks to tarheelkate in the comments.]

According to other reports, Barakat and Abu-Salha were just married a few weeks ago. She had recently graduated from NC State, and he was a UNC dental student.

A review of the Facebook page of the man charged in these murders, Craig Hicks, shows a consistent theme of anti-religion and progressive causes. Included in his many Facebook “likes” are the Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” Neil deGrasse Tyson, gay marriage groups, and a host of anti-conservative/Tea Party pages.

Remarkably, one of the four Facebook groups he had joined was “Religious Tolerance.”

Just a few weeks ago he had posted this to his Facebook page:

On the Unbelievable? Facebook page that I participate in, there are New Atheists who are claiming that since the atheist is from North Carolina, he must be a racist, not an atheist.

As if the two were mutually exclusive.

As if that kind of reasoning wasn't as bad as racism.

ABC manages to ignore the ethical/political background of the killer.

Hah! Good night last night!

I went to a lecture sponsored by Fresno State's philosophy department with Mike Michael Stannard.   The talk was by atheist secularist sociologist Phil Zuckerman and featured Zuckerman comparing Jamaica to Denmark in an effort to show that secular, non-religious countries are so much better than religious countries (conveniently ignoring the fact that Denmark has a declining population which is the second oldest in the world.)

It was a target rich environment for questioning.

Because Zuckerman put up this classic atheist cropped picture of "Benedict saluting Hitler" as part of his effort to show that religious people supported tyranny, I asked him if he knew that the full picture presented an entirely different picture?  He didn't.





Here it is.



He also said that Hitler was never excommunicated, and I asked him if he knew that (a) all Catholics who belonged to the Nazis were excommunicated in 1930, (b) Catholics were forbidden from voting for Nazis in 1932 and (c) Catholics were kicked out of the German bureaucracy in 1934.  He didn't.

I was about to get into the demographic decline of secular Denmark when I was cut off.

It was like a day on Facebook!

Like Banquo's ghost at the feast, you have to think that the virulent hostility of on the part of many atheists and secularists against the Catholic Church is that it teaches against sin and immorality rather than saying "do whatever you feel like doing."
Atheist Who Blamed Faith for Sexual Abuse Forced to Resign for Sexual Messages

Noted philosopher of the mind Colin McGinn is resigning from the University of Miami:

Mr. McGinn . . . denies allegations that he behaved improperly. Those allegations were lodged by a female graduate student who has said that the professor sent her a series of sexually explicit e-mail and text messages, starting in the spring-2012 semester. . . Mr. McGinn wrote that he had been thinking about the student while masturbating.

McGinn, a wide-ranging but not terribly careful critic of religious belief, wrote in 2008 that sexual abuse in the Catholic church was “made possible” by “unquestioning obedience to the authority of the representatives of the church, i.e. priests.”

 McGinn also has held up the idea of “atheist as ‘role-model’” which he calls a “revolutionary concept”:

[Atheists] make up in morality what they lack in belief; whereas believers have to do so much work to believe that they have no energy left over for morality. The depravity of the Catholic Church is a nice illustration.

Yet the abolition of the priesthood would not mean the end of clerisies, nor would it stop the abuse of authority. As Colin McGinn’s sad case reminds us, a world without faith is not a world without sin.

The pre-emptive smearing starts.

An Unbelievable? atheist posted a Huffington Post article with the headline "Pope Contender Cardinal Peter Turkson says no priest sex abuse in Africa because of anti-gay laws."

One small problem is that in the article, Cardinal Turkson says no such thing.  Here's the pertinent passage:

Cardinal Turkson is currently the second favourite to be the next pontiff, and had been championed by progressives who have urged the Vatican to elect the first African pope.

Cardinal Angelo Scola of Milan is currently favourite to succeed Benedict XVI.

In an interview with CNN, when asked about whether it was possible the Catholic sex abuse scandal could happen in Africa, the cardinal said it would not happen, "to the same extent or proportion as we have seen in Europe"

He continued: "African traditional systems kind of protect or have protected its population against this tendency.

“Because in several communities, in several cultures in Africa homosexuality or for that matter any affair between two sexes of the same kind, are not countenanced in our society.

"So that cultural taboo, that tradition has been there. It has served to keep it out.”

So I posted the following under the original post: 

Isn't that headline misleading?

If you read the article, Turkson is actually quoted as follows:  

//"In an interview with CNN, when asked about whether it was possible the Catholic sex abuse scandal could happen in Africa, the cardinal said it would not happen, "to the same extent or proportion as we have seen in Europe"//

So he doesn't say "no sex abuse," he says less sex abuse, which may be true in countries that execute pedophiles who are in a position of leadership. 

Why do you think the HuffPo misrepresents things about a Catholic Cardinal?

Operating from the Internet Atheist Playbook, here was a response:

In an interview with CNN, when asked about whether it was possible the Catholic sex abuse scandal could happen in Africa, the cardinal said it would not happen, he said, “"to the same extent or proportion as we have seen in Europe." He continued: "African traditional systems kind of protect or have protected its population against this tendency...because in several communities, in several cultures in Africa homosexuality or for that matter any affair between two sexes of the same kind, are not countenanced in our society. So that cultural taboo, that tradition has been there. It has served to keep it out.” HuffingtonPost.

Now let’s just unwind that statement: the child sex abuse scandal wasn’t one of homosexuality but one of paedophilia, according to the John Jay Report commissioned by the Catholic Church 73.3% of all American cases of abuse by priests involved children of 14 or under, and that’s not including the cases involving Catholic laity. The situation in Europe is very similar. The deliberate and malicious conflation of homosexuality with paedophilia has been deplored by all of the medical and scientific community as being completely wrong. In addition, the Cardinal seems unaware that a great many girls were abused by Catholic clergy, are we then to similarly deplore heterosexuality among the priesthood because it leads to the abuse of girls?

Cardinal Tirkson also gravely misrepresented African culture with regard to the acceptance of same-sex relationships. Since he must be a highly educated man he will know that he wasn’t telling the truth about same-sex relationships in traditional African culture which, prior to the arrival of European colonisers and their Christian missionaries, was common across the continent and is exceptionally well documented by African and European sources, including the missionaries who tried so hard to stamp it out.

Why do you think Cardinal Turkson found it necessary to lie? And why is the senior cardinal in the British Isles, Cardinal O’Brien, a prominent campaigner against gay rights, calling for an African cardinal to be the next pope? Answers on a postcard to the ‘Society for Telling Lies to Protect the Catholic Church from the Crimes for which it is Righty Accused.’//

My response:

//So, nobody can actually show me where Cardinal Peter Turkson Says there was "no Priest Sex Abuse In Africa Because Of Anti-Gay Laws." 

I see a lot of spinning about other statements that don't says anything like "no Priest Sex Abuse In Africa Because Of Anti-Gay Laws." 

Charles Bishop takes Turkson to task for Turkson's statements about "African traditional systems" as protecting against the same extent of minor abuse as in Europe, but he didn't talk about "anti-gay laws" in that passage, and he didn't talk about "no priest sex abuse", although that is what the headline claims. So, HuffPo is, again, lying.

I don't expect you true believers to see this. The cognitive dissonance would probably kill you.

Speaking of cognitive dissonance, Charles continues to spin on about his 76% of victims were 14 and under. Fine, under Charles' arbitrary ad hoc standard, that leave 1 in 4 boys who were victims of homosexuals who were not clinical pedophiles. 

Or if you accept the industry standard - the DSM IV - and include the 14 year olds among the group that falls outside of the definition of pedophilia, that number climbs to 40% of boys who were molested by homosexuals who were not clinically pedophile. 

But can any of you explain to me why a country with a law that would execute a priest for molesting a boy under 18 wouldn't in fact have fewer such molestations?

And:

It is really quite simple: We are now at round 3 and you all refuse to admit that the HuffPo's headline is a lie and that you can't show where Turkson said what they say he said.

Atheists - smearing people for the cause since 2002. 

Practical Darwin.

Atheism's declining numbers is based on atheists lack of "fitness," which is short-hand for the fact that women in general don't find the dregs of the science fiction/comic fanboy community attractive.

From the Dallas' Observer's big puff-piece about an atheist convention:

They just don't bring it in very large numbers. At the bar in Austin, some of the male atheists can't wait for more women to show up, probably for the reasons Watson described. Johnny and Ting, both in their late 20s and from Houston, are sitting a little glumly in a corner, several empty glasses in front of them. Johnny is a former Muslim; after he told his parents he was an atheist, his father "didn't speak to me for two years," he says. Ting is a Buddhist. He just came down for a weekend trip with his buddy.

"There are no girls here," Johnny says bluntly. "Look at these guys. Would you hang out with them? Do pretty girls want to hang out with these guys? I don't think so." Beyond that, Ting is East Asian and Johnny is Indian; this crowd, Johnny says, "is not our age group, and it's not our demographic."

But he's confident that'll change soon, he says.

"The atheist community, it's not the cool kids yet. But it will be. Right now, it's still a bad word, especially in Texas. What we're doing, we're paving the way for the cool kids to come on board."

He smiles and takes in the room, which is filling up with people. "Ten years from now, this is gonna be really big."
 

Riiiiight, because the nerd community hasn't been saying the same thing for the last 70 years.

Now, that's some kind of faith.

Chicago's Rahm Emmanuel is turning over Chicago's homeless services to a compassionate, care-providing, atheist, charitable group.

Ha- ha!  Fooled you!

Obviously, he's not doing that.  He's actually turning it over to Catholic Charities, which can do the job better and cheaper.

Emmanuel couldn't do turn the program over to a "compassionate, care-providing atheist charitable group" if he wanted to because there are no "compassionate, care-providing atheist charitable groups." 

The atheist idea of a "compassionate, care-providing atheist charitable group" is someone who sues a school because its football team ate breakfast at a church.

Atheism - under-achieving since the Enlightenment.

Atheists - continuing to build goodwill among the 99% of the community that aren't socially autistic dicks.

Atheist group sues school because football players ate meals prepared by local church.

A case study in the intellectual poverty of atheism - debate division.

A couple of days ago, I posted an excerpt from a philosopher who performed an "the emperor has no clothes" analysis on the arguments presented by atheists in debates with theists. Robert Hutchison wrote:

Recently, I’ve begun to systematically record all of the debates on the Existence of God that I can lay my hands on and listen to them at my leisure, usually while driving.

In the process, I made a shocking discovery. It turns out that the atheists are really, really good at insults but are actually quite poor debaters. The atheists insult Christianity, Judaism and religion generally with a nastiness that is almost breathtaking. They belittle. They demean. They insinuate. But the one thing they don’t do is offer intelligent arguments that disprove the existence of God.

In fact, they don’t actually reason at all.

By chance, I happened to listen to this William Lane Craig v. Mike Begon debate on "Is God a Delusion?" Begon's performance is like a case study in what Hutchinson wrote about.

Begon starts his presentation by defining a "delusion" as a belief for which their is either no evidence or which is not "axiomatic." While he spends a lot of time discussing what he means by an "axiom," he never defines what he means by evidence. He argues that the belief that potatoes on the moon are blue is "delusional" because there is "no evidence" that there are potatoes on the moon. He spends the entire 20 minutes of his initial speech without ever providing an argument tending to show that the belief in God is false, as opposed to unsupported by "evidence," whatever that means.

Well, this is lame. As Craig points out, delusions are false beliefs. In addition, we would hold that a belief that potatoes on the moon are blue is delusional because we have evidence that there are no potatoes on the moon.

After Craig presents arguments based on Aristotelian reasoning from premises - based on the current state of scientific knowledge - to conclusions, Began concedes Craig's premises, but then calls the conclusions "assertions," thereby demonstrating that he doesn't understand the fundamentals of logic.

Began also clearly doesn't understand the basic Aristotelian argument concerning the first cause because he ignores the problem of infinite regress by asserting that God needs a creator. (More importantly, he ignores Craig's actual argument.)

As Craig points out, by conceding his premises Began is conceding that the universe had a creator and a designer, but Began never offers any kind of explanation as to who/what this creator/designer might be if not God. Began never attempted to explain this incoherence on his part.

Began never addresses the self-refuting nature of his fundamental claim, i.e., since his view that any belief which is not supported by evidence or axiomatic is delusional is itself not supported by evidence or axiomatic, then his belief is delusional. In fact, the first question to Began - asking him if he is delusional for believing that his children is delusional since Began hasn't had them genetically tested - underscores the problem in Began's position, and the ambiguity of the term "evidence."

Began's final speech is devoted to a series of assertions about the dangers of non-evidential thinking and how the world is at risk because of non-evidential thinking. Began offers nothing but assertions, no evidence for his position, and simply attempts to "poison the well" by linking Craig's position to Islamofascism terrorism.

At no time does Began acknowledge that Craig offered scientific evidence to support his cosmological and design arguments.

Listen to the debate and tell me what you think.

There are certainly good arguments for atheism. The problem is that atheists aren't making them.

I've noticed the point that Robert Hutchinson makes in this article. I've watched every atheist/theist debate I can get my hands on, and it's clear that the atheists get routinely pounded on logic and facts that they either can't answer or which they haven't spent the time thinking about. As for what they do focus on the historical sins of religion - their arguments are usually factually shoddy or fallacious.

Likewise, their books are often embarassing in their shallowness, ignorance, pomposity and arrogance. Christopher Hitchens, for example, attempts to take down all of Aquinas' arguments with the claim that Aquinas argued for the ontological proof, which he didn't, shows that Hitchens didn't have the foggiest idea about what he was talking about.

It's enough to convince a person of the truth of Christianity.

Hutchinson writes:

At the time, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins were supposedly going around doing debates, taking on people like author Dinesh D’Souza and the Oxford theologian and former scientist Alister McGrath. The impression I got was that Hitchens was simply demolishing the theists with his rapier-like wit and vast erudition. Also, I have always looked with awe on Oxbridge philosophy – home of such luminaries as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elisabeth Anscombe and so on – and so I assumed that the UK philosophers would trot out their superior logical skills, decades of logical analysis, and easily smash the dusty old arguments of theism. (Truth be told, however, Fr. Coppleston more than held his own against Lord Russell in their famous 1948 debate on the BBC.)

It turns out that I was utterly deluded. Recently, I’ve begun to systematically record all of the debates on the Existence of God that I can lay my hands on and listen to them at my leisure, usually while driving.

In the process, I made a shocking discovery. It turns out that the atheists are really, really good at insults but are actually quite poor debaters. The atheists insult Christianity, Judaism and religion generally with a nastiness that is almost breathtaking. They belittle. They demean. They insinuate. But the one thing they don’t do is offer intelligent arguments that disprove the existence of God.

In fact, they don’t actually reason at all.

Reasoning, after all, is a systematic questioning of assumptions… a marshaling of evidence… a critical examination of arguments. It is not, primarily, name-calling. When I first started watching these debates, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I assumed the atheists would eventually put forward logical arguments that the Theists would be hard pressed to answer. What I wasn’t prepared for was that the atheists didn’t really marshal salient arguments at all: they merely sneered. The New Atheists are plainly accustomed to standing up in front of large groups of college students, making snide put-downs that get a lot of laughs and applause; and they are quite good at demolishing arguments made by young earth Creationists and snake-handling fundamentalists. But when faced with genuine Christian intellectuals – such as the philosopher William Lane Craig – they fail utterly even to engage the principal arguments being made.

For example, when Craig debated Sam Harris on the topic of moral values – whether you can establish the existence of objective moral values without recourse to God – Craig offered three extremely precise reasons why Harris failed to prove the existence of objective moral values in his then-latest book, The Moral Landscape. He offered a detailed, step by step critique for why Harris’s argument in his book is, at bottom, logically incoherent.

When it came time for Harris to respond, he didn’t. He didn’t respond to a single one of Craig’s logical arguments. Instead, he simply changed the subject – and fell back on his snide one-liner attacks on the Bible and how stupid Christians are.

Craig is a machine, but the overmatch is obvious virtually every single time, whether the Christian is D'Souza or a "lesser name."

Hutchinson's conclusion expresses my sentiment:

It’s true that many atheists are now embarrassed by Dawkins’s refusal to debate Craig. They recognize that such arrogance only underscores the reality that, for all their swagger, the New Atheists are actually bereft of the one thing they claim to have but don’t: rational arguments. For armchair philosophizers such as myself, who follow these debates like beach volleyball at the Olympics, we can only hope that one day the New Atheists will gather their forces and give us all a real argument worth pondering.

These are important arguments; the atheist team ought to "cowboy up" and make a game of it.

Atheist Morality - a morality suitable for silverback gorillas and tenured professors of the public knowledge of Science.

Richard Dawkins defends the idea of having a mistress and lying about it.

Atheist morality is either utterly confusing as a matter of reason or entirely transparent as a matter of original sin. Thus, sometimes atheists want to explain morality as a matter of evolution and natural selection, such as when people do good things for each other altruistically. In such cases, you see, people have no choice because it is to their evolutionary advantage in some wider sense to lay down their life for a complete stranger.

On the other hand, sometimes atheists want us to "rise above" our evolutionary programming, such as when they advocate atheism when it seems obvious that there is a "religious sense" built into human nature. What it means to rise "above" or to "progress" beyond our nature is unclear because such words of directionality imply, well, a direction, and, of course, atheist materialism denies that their is any metaphysical entities such as "above" to rise to. On the atheist account, "progress" and "above" are just arbitrary words selected to indicate the idea that "I, Richard Dawkins" approve of this."

And, then, there is this account, where Dawkins rails against monogamy and telling the truth as if those ideals were an ingrained feature of human nature, rather than the tenuous result of social conditioning:

From a Darwinian perspective, sexual jealousy is easily understood. Natural selection of our wild ancestors plausibly favored males who guarded their mates for fear of squandering economic resources on other men's children. On the female side, it is harder to make a Darwinian case for the sort of vindictive jealousy displayed by Mrs. Tarrant. No doubt hindsight could do it, but I want to make a different point. Sexual jealousy may in some Darwinian sense accord with nature, but "Nature, Mr. Allnutt, is what we are put in this world to rise above." Just as we rise above nature when we spend time writing a book or a symphony rather than devoting our time to sowing our selfish genes and fighting our rivals, so mightn't we rise above nature when tempted by the vice of sexual jealousy?

I, for one, feel drawn to the idea that there is something noble and virtuous in rising above nature in this way. I admit that I have, at times in my life, been jealous, but it is one of the things I now regret. Assuming that such practical matters as sexually transmitted diseases and the paternity of children can be sorted out (and nowadays DNA testing will clinch that for you if you are sufficiently suspicious, which I am not), what, actually, is wrong with loving more than one person? Why should you deny your loved one the pleasure of sexual encounters with others, if he or she is that way inclined? The British writer Julie Burchill is not somebody I usually quote (imagine a sort of intelligent Ann Coulter speaking with a British accent in a voice like Minnie Mouse) but I was struck by one of her remarks. I can't find the exact quote, but it was to the effect that, however much you love your mate (of either sex in the case of the bisexual Burchill) sex with a stranger is almost always more exciting, purely because it is a stranger. An exaggeration, no doubt, but the same grain of truth lurks in Woody Allen's "Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it's one of the best."

So, jealousy, which presumes fidelity, covenant-keeping and integrity, is a evolutionary appendix that has to be "risen above." But cheating and lying somehow are unaccountable by Darwinian selection?

This is nonsense on stilts. G.K. Chesterton once said it is surprising that people have rejected the doctrine of original sin because it is the only doctrine that can be empirically verified. It is an amazing tribute to the autistic worldview of Dawkins that he doesn't see this.

But sin makes you stupid. Perhaps it is not so surprising that a person with celebrity and groupies and fans, such as Dawkins, finds an attraction to a morality that excuses infidelity and lying. We might say that is a convenient morality.

We might also say that is the kind of morality you get when you appoint yourself the arbiter of morality.

Poor Atheists. Not only are they doomed to extinction because evolution selects for the religious...

...but atheist chicks think atheist dudes are grabby dorks.

James Taranto summarizes the low-attendance of women at the big annual atheist conclave as follows:

Also, the "skeptic community" is a self-selecting group, and it may be that the behavior the RNS story notes is a product of this selection. One hypothesis is that male skeptics are less socially adept than believers, because the former group either missed the socialization that comes with a religious upbringing or rebelled against it. And, as the RNS article notes, women are generally more religious than men. That would be consistent with the hypothesis that female skeptics tend to be more masculine than the average woman.

If our hypotheses are correct, then The Amazing Meeting is a confab of socially inept guys competing for the attention of a smaller number of unusually masculine women--and being rebuffed most of the time, to judge by the report.

Fortunately for the atheist community, there is a nearly inexhaustible supply of poorly socialized teenagers.

Evolution favors religion.

The more religious a person is the more likely they have more children:

"It is a great irony but evolution appears to discriminate against atheists and favour those with religious beliefs," said Michael Blume, a researcher at the University of Jena in Germany who carried out the study. "Most societies or communities that have espoused atheistic beliefs have not survived more than a century."

The idea that being religious is an evolutionary advantage is in direct contradiction to theories developed and promoted by atheists like Richard Dawkins who have suggested that religions are like viruses of the mind which infect people and impose great costs in terms of money, time and health risks.

Blume's work suggests the exact opposite - that evolution favours religious believers so strongly that, over time, a tendency to be religious has become embedded in our genes.

The research suggests that the key fact is simply that the more religious people are, the more children they tend to have. This is because most religions place a high value on child-bearing, suggesting it is a holy duty.

Without religion, by contrast, atheists often see far less point in having children and so have smaller families or none at all.

There are, however, other factors too, such as having strong shared religious beliefs allows people to fit into a community more easily, accepting shared tasks and rules of behaviour. This ability to work together further raises the survival chances of children.

In his research into the "Reproductive Advantages of Religion", presented at a recent conference in Bristol, Blume found that all over the world and in many different ages, religious people have had far more children than nonreligious people.

What's more, fundamentalists of all religions have the most children of all. It means atheistic or secular groups tend to die out while fundamentalists of all faiths thrive - a process which means evolution will tend to favour people with a genetic predisposition to hold strong religious beliefs.

Athiests are quite incoherent about evolution and morality. You hear atheist apologists argue that morality is the product of evolution and that things like altruism arise from the fact that altruism works. Things like reciprocity and charity were selected by evolution because they work to ensure the survival of the genes in a community when the community outcompetes communities that lack those programmed traits.

Other times they appeal to a standard beyone evolution. Could it be that enslaving other communities and intolerance of homosexuals are competitive advantages and thereby justified as moral by evolutionary history? Perish the thought; Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and others would deny that simply deny the morality indicated by the darker side of our evolutionary history.

If atheists truly believed that morality is defined by evolutionary psychology, they would promote religion - and adopt forms of religion. But they don't, because they believe in objective morality, which means that they believe in God.

Forged - New Atheists Fabricate Augustine.

If the New Atheists are the epitome of enlightened reason and virtue, why do they fabricate quotes?

Nick Peters at Deeper Waters writes:

I woke up this morning to find on my Facebook a request from a friend of mine concerning a debate she was in on the Unbelievable page asking if I would know the correct source for a quote an atheist had given. I’m going to use one as an example.

“There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.”
— St. Augustine (354 – 430), one of the “great” church fathers, Confessions

Okay. Confessions is a big book. It has several chapters to it. It’s not feasible to just pick it up and start reading, so the best thing to do is to do a search for the quote, although one can go to google books and look for some quotes there. What I do in this case is to take the first sentence, go to google, put it in quotes, and search.

An even better approach these days is to run a word search through your Kindle to PC connection. If you do that you come up with the following:

Augustine wrote in Book X of the Confessions:

"There is still another temptation, one more fraught with danger. In addition to the concupiscence of the flesh, which lures us to indulge in the pleasures of all the senses, and brings disaster on its slaves who flee far from you,148 there is also concupiscence of the mind, a frivolous, avid curiosity. Though it works through these same senses it is a craving not for gratification of the flesh but for experience through the flesh. It masquerades as a zeal for knowledge and learning. Since it is rooted in a thirst for firsthand information about everything, and since the eyes are paramount among the senses in acquiring information, this inquisitive tendency is called in holy scripture concupiscence of the eyes."

St. Augustine (2007-04-01). The Confessions, Revised (The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Vol. 1) (Kindle Locations 6627-6633). New City Press. Kindle Edition.
Confessions, Book X, 35, 54.

Augustine was not talking about "curiosity" as that which impels us to know. He certainly wouldn't disagree with Aristotle that "all men want to know," and he certainly would agree that the final cause of reason is truth.

Rather he was referring to a kind of vice that seeks out the novel as novel - the kind of "curiosity" that sparks a person's desire to see a dead rotting corpse just to see it.

"55. From this consideration the distinction more clearly emerges between two kinds of activity on the part of the senses: pleasure-seeking and curiosity; for sensuality pursues the beautiful, the melodious, the fragrant, the tasty and the silky, whereas curiosity seeks the opposite to all these, not because it wants to undergo discomfort but from lust to experience and find out. What sensual pleasure is to be had in viewing a mangled corpse which sickens you? Yet if there is one lying anywhere, people congregate in order to experience ashen-faced horror. At the same time they are frightened that it may give them nightmares! Anyone would think they had been forced to look at the thing while awake, or had been persuaded to do so by some rumor of its beauty."

St. Augustine (2007-04-01). The Confessions, Revised (The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century, Vol. 1) (Kindle Locations 6639-6644). New City Press. Kindle Edition.

Augustine also disdained under the heading of "curiosity" the desire to seek out astrologers. So, all the New Atheists can take that and smoke it.

The Limits of Pure Science.

Lawyer-turned-science fiction author, Michael Flynn, turns his talents on those who would worship reason rather than use it.

The Irony of Atheism.

From the Gospel Coalition:

The contrasts are clear: atheists claim that religion is the main barrier to reason. Christians believe our capacity to reason comes from being created in the image of an all-knowing God, and the active use of reason is an important way to honor him. Atheists brand themselves as a community united by reason. Christians marvel at how this group rallies together even as their most prominent leader, Richard Dawkins, argues that evolution favors the selfish gene, not the reasonable group. Atheists work hard to eradicate religion for the sake of a brighter future. Christians are amazed that atheists so blissfully ignore the scientific fact that, if religion is a false consolation, the future always ends in death.

And:

One of the great ironies of the contemporary atheistic movement comes from its ubiquitous use of rhetoric, branding, and emotional triggers to advocate for reason.

And:

Leading atheist Sam Harris says "faith is a conversation stopper." Christians reply that Harris has also said that none of us is "the author of your thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose." The reductionistic, deterministic, and materialistic worldview of many atheists seems, to reasonable Christians, to exclude the existence of transcendent, immaterial things like propositions, the rules of logic, and, most important of all, the very existence of minds.

A few old, liberal celebrities and a small crowd of people who found time off from watching old episodes of "Mystery Science Theater" in their parents' basement indulge in a "two minute hate."

Charles Spiering at Crisis appears to have earned many years off of purgatory by suffering through the "Rally for Reason" event:

“God if you’re there, we’re here in Washington, come down now,” atheist Comedian Eddie Izzard shouted mockingly during Saturday’s Rally for Reason. “If you’re there, this is a pretty good time to show up. I’m sure folks here would love it.”

“He never comes down,” Izzard added with a laugh before launching nearly an hour long comedy sketch mocking God, the bible, and religion for a soggy crowd of about 8,000 – 10,000 people who stood on the National Mall in the rain.

“This weather isn’t from God,” added Izzard. “If God was the judge of the weather, what was all those tornadoes that go down the Bible Belt? What does that mean? Weather is just weather ladies and gentlemen.”

Saturday, secular atheists met in Washington D.C. for a rally billed as “the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history.” Organizers insisted prior to the event that the rally was to encourage each other, to dispel stereotypes, and seek “legislative equality.”

But as gloomy rain clouds hung low over the Washington Monument, the rally quickly degenerated into open mockery of religion and people of faith.

“F— the motherf—-, f— the mother—- pope,” sang Musician Tim Minchin as he played profane songs on the piano for a laughing and cheering crowd.

Few religions remained unscathed while cruel spokesmen of reason roundly ridiculed Mormons, Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims.

As the event continued, it became clear that the leaders of the movement were not clamoring for equality, but rather superiority.

“When it comes to religion, we’re not two sides of the same coin and you don’t get to put your unreason on the same shelf as my reason,” HBO’s Liberal comedian Bill Maher said to the crowd via a video monitor. “Your stuff has to go over there on the shelf with Zeus and Thor and the Kracken.”

The audience then cheered loudly as he began a mock ritual that “un-baptized” Mitt Romney’s father-in-law out of the Mormon faith.

But even the laughs turned into malaise as the event drew to a close. Famed atheist headliner Richard Dawkins labored through a speech that quickly grew bitter.

“Do you really believe that when a priest blesses a wafer, it turns into the body of Christ?” he said, ridiculing Catholics. “Are you seriously telling me you believe that? Are you seriously saying that wine turns into blood?”

Hawkins challenged his fellow atheists to expose people who still cling to their faith in spite of their doubts.

“Mock them, ridicule them in public, don’t fall for the convention that we’re far to polite to talk about religion,” a frustrated Dawkins continued, “Religion is not off the table. Religion is not off limits. Religion makes specific claims about the universe, which need to be substantiated. They should be challenged and ridiculed with contempt.”

Saturday’s rally provided a rare look into the secularism that is pushing its way into the public square.

The speakers that drew the loudest applause were not the people who praised reason, but persecuted faith. Unchallenged and in like-minded company, the cultural and political leaders of the atheist movement freely mocked and dismissed people of faith.

The brash superiority preached by atheists such as Hawkins shows that they are not content with a right to “unreligious freedom,” but seek suppression of religious expression.

If people of faith allow themselves to be bullied into silence, we can expect this sentiment to grow in our society. The existence of such a society requires submission from people of faith.

This rally demonstrates something that the Nazis knew: hating a scapegoat can be emotionally satisfying.

Here's an odd one - it seems that atheists don't like being mocked or accused of being part of a history of violence.

But since they don't believe in the "Golden Rule" or objective morality, they don't see any reason not to mock others or accuse Christians - fundamentalist or otherwise - of violence when they feel like it.

In the comments to this post, Al Stefanelli, Georgia State Director for the American Atheists takes me to task for daring - daring! - to suggest that given the history of atheism, which has often attempted to achieve its goal of eradicating certain ideas by murdering the humans who carry those ideas, his calls for a jihad against religious beliefs might be less than, well, benign, or, if history is a clue, a stark foreshadowing of what will happen if these dime-store supermen ever get power.

And why shouldn't reasonable people be concerned given the history of murder that atheists have engaged in? After all, what are people to atheists? According to their leading lights, people are mere animals - slightly more evolved mammals, according to Christopher Hitchens, and a random collection of molecules that accidentally happened to develop something that deludes human beings into thinking they are self-conscious, according to Richard Dawkins. Given that view of human nature, why should we not believe that they wouldn't "break a few eggs" - or, hell, send millions of eggs off to the Gulag - to make their favorite omelette?

They've done it in the past.

But rather than answer that question, Stefanelli wants to assert some intangible, non-empirical "moral obligation" against me - as if life wasn't a meaningless stew of zombie humans attempting to beat the Darwinian game of survival:

Al Stefanelli said...

For such a respected blog as your to make such an amateurish mistake is very disheartening. The piece I wrote for the American Atheist blog did not call for the extermination or eradication of Christians, which has been explained ad nauseum already.

It was a call for the eradication of doctrines from within Christianity that are used to violent ends. Doctrines that espouse hatred and discrimination against homosexuals, etc.

The church has done this before, as we do not stone adulterers, etc. I am a peaceful man, and have made it quite clear that I abhor all levels of violence unless one is defending themselves from imminent danger.

Feel free to quote anything that I have had published in the media, but be responsible and do it accurately.

My response:

Peter Sean Bradley said...

Mr. Stefinelli,

Apparently, you didn't actually read what I wrote, or you lack the sense of irony that God - if you will pardon that expression - gave a turnip.

What I asked, in the light of your intolerant and mean-spirited communication, was, inasmuch as atheism had demonstrated a history of murdering people who atheists believed held ungood badthink ideas because those people held such ungood badthink ideas, what should we think when modern atheists once again started using "eliminationist" rhetoric to "exterminate certain ideas?

If you have a scintilla of honesty and/or self-awareness, you'll have to admit that historical atheists were not averse to - Hell, they were positively giddy about - murdering actual human beings as their way of "exterminating" ideas."

Long story short, in light of the murderous history of atheism, why should anyone believe that you aren't implicitly calling for the murder of religious believers?

What have you ever done to make us think that we'd be safe if atheists were once again in charge?

File under "Scratch an Atheist, find a Fundamentalist."

The author of this article at "Gather" states the problem with Dawkins' speech at "The Reason Rally":

It would not be offensive to have a gathering of like-minded people to engage in secular discussion and activities relevant to their non-belief. What is offensive is actively encouraging hatred for people who believe in something greater than themselves. Why would any speaker encourage anyone to mock and show contempt for people that they do not even know? Is this not akin to racism? Is it a "Reason" rally? Or an anti-religion rally? According to a recent article, "this rally is not simply about protecting the rights of non-believers, but about the inferiority of religious belief."

Is there not an irony in speaking out against intolerance while being intolerant? Richard Dawkins' foundation's mission is in part, a "quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and suffering." Perhaps the atheists, by encouraging "ridicule and contempt" for believers, are closer than they think to those who may invoke God to bring wrath upon those with whom they disagree.

Let's have a conversation about religion, spirituality and ethics...

...unless you actually believe that crap.

The USA Today offers a warm and friendly report on the "Reason Rally."

Apparently Richard Dawkins was in typical form:

Dawkins didn't appear until five hours into the event, but few seemed discouraged by the near-constant rain or drizzle. They whistled and cheered for his familiar lines such as:

I don't despise religious people. I despise what they stand for ...

Evolution is not just true, it's beautiful ...

Then Dawkins got to the part where he calls on the crowd not only to challenge religious people but to "ridicule and show contempt" for their doctrines and sacraments, including the Eucharist, which Catholics believe becomes the body of Christ during Mass.

So, even though the USA Today's columnist Cathy Lynn Grossman claims her column is about having a "conversation about religion, spirituality and ethics," she is willing to write a puff piece about people who don't want to have a conversation - they want to show contempt and yell and do anything that communicates their feelings. They certainly weren't willing to debate.

Notice also the anti-Catholic animus of Dawkins - he doesn't single out the Lutherans or the Anglicans, much less Jews or Muslims.

Why is that? Is it because he knows that it is rhetorically acceptable to pick on that one religion out of all the others.

Certainly, in light of the Obama administration's - along with the mainstream press's - jumping on the contraception issue, which can only have been designed to direct public antipathy against Catholics alone, as part of Obama's strategy of division, Dawkins must have gotten the message that it is permissible to target Catholics.

Tolerance is the moment between breathing out one orthodoxy and breathing in another.

New Atheists - just another fascist political program.

Are Atheists reverting to type?

Given the large number of actual religious believers who have actually been murdered by actual atheists, should it be a matter of indifference when the leader of an atheist organization expresses a desire to "exterminate" or eradicate Christians, "fundamentalist Christians" or "Christianity"?

This post from Salvo highlights the question:

Consider this post on the American Atheists web site. (The PDF is saved here because they’ve withdrawn the post, but you can still see it with Google Cache)

Excerpt:

It should come as no surprise that the individuals who abide by fundamentalist Christian… doctrines would be the first to cry out that they are being persecuted when their dangerous, damaging and disingenuous beliefs come under attack. Most of these people lack the maturity and intelligence to act in a socially acceptable manner. Many of them are sociopaths and quite a good number of them are psychopaths. All of them are clearly delusional.

The fact is that fundamentalist Christians… are not interested in coexisting or getting along. They have no desire for peace. They do not want to sit down with us in diplomatic efforts to iron out our differences and come to an agreement on developing an integrated society.

They want us to die.

Their interpretation of the Bible… are such that there is no other course of action but to kill the infidel, and if anyone believes otherwise they are only fooling themselves. It is not just in the best interests of atheists to be intolerant of fundamental Christianity and radical Islam, but it is also in the best interest of mainstream believers within these faiths, as well. Moderates and even Progressives who stand in support of extremists just because there is a claim to the same deity are not doing themselves any favors. Fundamental Christians make all Christians look bad…

…the underbelly of fundamentalist Christianity… does not operate in the legal system. They don’t respond to lawsuits, letters, amicus briefs or other grass-roots campaigns and they must, must, must be eradicated.

That doesn’t sound very tolerant or open-minded. It was written by “Al Stefanelli – Georgia State Director, American Atheists, Inc.”. Now, this isn’t the view of most atheists that I know, but it is the view of some organized atheists like those in the American Atheists group.

What do they mean by eradicating Christianity?

From the correspondence with Tom Gilson, we now know that they don’t want a conversation and they refuse to hear both sides in a debate. So they aren’t trying to eradicate Christian ideas by winning conversations or winning debates. What does that leave as a meaning of the phrase “eradicating Christianity”? Can we infer what they mean by “eradicating Christianity” from the e-mail sent by David Silverman? Could it be that eradicating Christianity means using coercion to suppress beliefs that atheists disagree with, so that they won’t be offended while they are busy having a good time? That seems to be consistent with what Al Stefanelli and David Silverman said, but it’s just my guess.

Now consider this post from the UK Daily Mail which discusses a recent interview with Richard Dawkins.

Excerpt:

But the centrepiece of this Christmas edition is the main coup for the New Statesman – an interview by Prof. Dawkins with Christopher Hitchens, the great polymath who today lost his fight against cancer. It’s a fascinating read over three double-page spreads. Not least because Prof. Dawkins reveals a charming humility, allowing Hitchens to show his intellectual superiority at his own expense. Hitchens is thoughtful about CS Lewis and Christianity and rather leaves Prof. Dawkins floundering in his wake, occasionally interjecting little assents to show that he’s still there, as he struggles to keep up.

But one of these interjections is most revealing. About half-way through, the Prof gets this in edgeways: ‘Do you ever worry that if we win and, so to speak, destroy Christianity, that vacuum would be filled by Islam?’

So, ‘if we win…and destroy Christianity’. True, there’s a ‘so to speak’ in there, but it doesn’t do much. Try ‘If we win and, so to speak, kill all the Jews’ as an alternative. Doesn’t really work, does it? And Prof Dawkins can hardly claim that he was misquoted or taken out of context. He was editing the magazine, after all – there’s even a picture of him doing so, pen poised masterfully over page proofs.

Again, that seems to me to be echoing the language of the the American Atheist person who wanted to eradicate Christianity. Indeed, Dawkins is not a very timid fellow. In this video, he expresses his support for infanticide, which most people view as equivalent to murder. I don’t think he means “destroy Christianity” intellectually, since he refused his chance to do that when he refused to debate William Lane Craig, as documented in the liberal UK Guardian. I think he means something else by “destroy Christianity”, but I’m not exactly clear what. Let’s hope it’s something different than what other atheists have meant by it in history.

The American Atheist president tried to explain that he meant "Christian ideas" but so did Stalin, Mao, Lenin and the rest of the atheists-with-actual-political-power. Those atheists realized that ideas were carried by actual human beings, and, well, "you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs," if you know what I mean.

So, given the history of atheists murdering people to eradicate ungood badthink religious ideas, should we just pass off all this talk as mere hyperbole?