digital.goth.geek

Rowan Pelling, in The Independent, whines that belief (has) become socially unacceptable and that it’s better than nothingness, proving once again that certain theists have absolutely no concept of either a) a logical argument, or b) what it means not to have a blind faith.

She expounds the virtues of beliving in pixies, yetis, werewolves, spontaneous combustion, alien abduction, the Tardis, David Icke, oh, and god, yet denounces a lack of faith as being concerned only with such matters as NHS, bird flu, global warming, golf, Ken Livingstone, Richard Dawkins and the knowledge that you are but an infinitesimally small speck of dust in the infinite expanse of time and space that is the universe, soon to be obliterated for ever.

Just because I don’t think that the world (or indeed the universe) is made up of elves, fairies, ogres, invisible pink unicorns, giant slver flying space toasters, lizard people or pasta-based meatball-eyed squid-like supreme beings doesn’t mean that all I (and non-theists in general) think about is the mundane, the depressing and the insignificant, which are then rendered pointless anyway by the ultimate end of the universe.

Is it really such a terrible thing to dream of angels, clouds and a tea party with your dead nan instead of all this dread nothingness?

This is classic fearmongering, commonly used to frighten children when they start asking awkward (i.e. completely warranted yet ultimately unanswerable) questions of theist parents, as well as making assumptions about what non-theists accept as their fate. If you want to frighen someone show them (or create) an enemy (in this case dread nothingness) and personify it. This then leads to the obvious conclusion that, if it’s an enemy, it must be evil. Oh! Evil. How that stirs the blood!

The universe will continue on it’s merry way without me, giving life and choice and pleasure and pain and experience (and, yes, ultimately death) to anyone and anything that happens to come along. What those that have existence do with their time, I can’t say, but I hope it would be well spent in taking a bit of time to enjoy themselves and not spending the entire of their span in supplication to some imaginary divinity.

And they wonder why mental illness is rapidly becoming the largest public health issue of our time in the Western world.

With this one statement you’ve just declared that you believe that sanity is the dominion of the religious alone (which can in no way ever be true - how sane is it to believe in any of the supernatural nonsense you list above without any evidence whatsoever) and then proceeded to insult those that have some sort of real mental instability (something that they have to live with every day) as being a product of not having belief. Your arrogance is coming along in leaps and bounds now.

We would think it mean to tell a small child that their imaginary friend doesn’t exist, and yet we think it’s perfectly reasonable to debunk God in front of happily credulous adults.

1. Children need to be educated, not indoctrinated.
2. Gullibility and naïvity are not good qualities for adults to have, especially when they’re leaders of countries. You know who I mean.

Skepticism in extremis is not healthy (nothing is) as it ultimately boils down to nihilism. But if I see a cabbage, I think the cabbage is there. If I see a closed box, I’m justified in saying that I doubt that there’s a cabbage inside until I can check for myself. If I’m told that there is a closed box with a cabbage in, somewhere in the universe, yet I can’t see it, feel it, touch it without just believing that it’s there because you say so, then I’m going to have no choice but to flat out refuse to believe that the cabbage inside the invisible box is nothing but a figment of your imagination. This all assumes that said cabbage in a box is also all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving and created the universe in 6 days. Oh, and it’s also it’s own offspring.

Atheism is not nihilism. Atheists don’t think that life is pointless. We think that life is for living (see the words are related). We just don’t do it by the rules of some mad old man in Rome, a 2000 year old book of increasingly decreasing verifiable veracity, or lights, music and/or voices in our heads. Nor just because some intellectually lazy misogynist in a frock tells me so.

You don’t need to worry about not being a child of the Enlightenment; I, for one, am glad you’re not.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 22nd, 2006 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.