"Atheists who bring logic to the Easter story are missing the point," argues Julian Baggini in The Guardian this illogical Easter time.
"Having faith is a complex business. To assume that religious people are either crazy or stupid is lazy," argues philosopher, Baggini.
I'm no philosopher, Nietzsche is something I splutter when I sneeze so who the hell am I to argue with Baggini's argument that it's lazy to brand people who believe in imaginary beings and look at religious stories with any degree of logic as somewhat foolish? And who knows, maybe Baggini's argument might even sway non-believers into, if not accepting Jesus as their personal saviour, at least respecting those who choose to believe in 2000 year old sky gods.
"Many years ago, I had to recount the life of Jesus to a young Taiwanese student who knew nothing about Christianity. As I told him about the virgin birth, the miracles, crucifixion and resurrection, he responded with incredulous laughter."
Ha ha ha ha ha ha, yeah stupid idiots.
"Most nonbelievers in traditionally Christian cultures would show a bit more respect."
Ahem, yes, well, the uh Christian tradition has a lot of um good things to uh no, I've lost it. Why the hell should one respect irrational beliefs? That's irrational. Are we going to then say, no, don't laugh at those southern hick farmers in the US who claim to have been anally probed by space alien "greys"? Or those that believe that the alignment of planets can foresee your future? Or those that believe some people can commune with spirits of the dead, miraculously telling you things like where those keys are that you lost three years ago (inside the sofa)? Why would religion have this special expectation of respect? And isn't Baggini laughing on the inside while nodding sagely and saying yes, that's interesting, virgin birth you say? Resurrection from the dead? Ascent to heaven? Snigger.
"But inside, our reaction is often pretty much the same: how can people really believe this stuff?"
Exactly, Julian. Point out now just how nutty the Passion story is:
"Rising from the grave isn’t even the most preposterous part of the Easter story. Far more bizarre is the claim that God had to send his son to die for our sins. And if God really wanted all humanity to heed his message, why did the resurrected Christ only reveal himself to a few select people before ascending to heaven?"
Suddenly alien probing, astrology or clairvoyance seems rational in comparison. What of vociferous Atheists though?
"Vociferous atheists don’t shy away from revealing their mocking bemusement at all this."
It's vociferous now to be bemused by belief of fantasies without any evidence? What are non-vociferous Atheists, like Julian Baggini, up to then?
"Those of us who make determined efforts to understand and debate with religious believers might be too polite to admit it, but we often feel just as baffled."
Yes, well you would wouldn't you? What's the point in debating with or trying to understand someone who believes in a sky god who made the universe, for some reason then made us all sinners because one chick gave into forbidden fruit temptation so said sky god sends down his own son in physical yet also spiritual form who does carpentry for a bit, disappears for around 20 odd years then wanders about a tiny backwater of the world preaching for a few months that he's the son of god, can bring back the dead, walk on water, organize large scale picnics from next to nothing (all very useful but why not stop war, famine, etc. while you're at it?) then gets himself nailed to a cross, comes back to life and miraculously only appears to a couple of people he already knew who believed in him and then ascended to heaven and took all our sins except we continue to sin and that's why evil still exists in the world or something blah blah...?
How can you debate with anyone who believes this? It would be liking trying to debate Nietzsche's idea of eternal return with a dog. It's like trying to get my mum to understand how the internet works. It's pointless. If someone is going to believe utterly irrational ideas based on some faith that they'll be rewarded with an afterlife it's absurd to try and have a rational debate with them.
"The laziest way to try to cross this credulity gap is to shrug our shoulders and accept that people are often crazy, stupid or both."
That's lazy thinking from a philosopher. If Christian thinking is illogical, as Baggini, an Atheist, asserts then it follows that it's also crazy and stupid Oxford Dictionary: Illogical synonyms.
How is this lazy? Why would anyone bother to debate with a crazy person?
"Yes, there are plenty of people celebrating the resurrection who are sane, intelligent and well-educated, but they are statistical anomalies in a world where higher levels of education are strongly correlated with a lack of religious belief."
Crazy, irrational, stupid, illogical, uneducated...what more does one need? So, well educated, sane, intelligent people also celebrate the resurrection. Yep, it's something that's always baffled me.
Archbishops of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and Justin Welby, both seemingly intelligent and top blokes. Yet, yet...apart from believing the whole rebounding Jesus story they are happy to dress up as wizards and preside over arcane rituals. Yet I'm assuming both do not believe their magic text as some sort of objective truth but rather project their own symbolic meaning onto it in order to both gain a pretty good living and assuage their own cognitive dissonance.
"Smart people can have blind spots," says Baggini, going on to prove his own point. "But this quick and easy explanation does not do justice to the complexities of religious belief. If we genuinely accept that a believer in the resurrection can be intelligent, but also think that any intelligent person would find the idea of the resurrection preposterous, the most charitable explanation is that intelligent believers are as aware of the implausibility of their beliefs as anyone else. This is indeed what you tend to find if you bother to talk to a Christian. They don’t use the word “miracle” for nothing – they know their faith defies laws of logic and nature."
Then, if I bothered, why would I bother? I mean, that is cognitive dissonance in action. Why would you want to discuss something that someone doesn't actually literally believe but believes nonetheless in spite of their own intelligence telling them it has to be nonsense? That's madness on a grand scale. Why on earth would any rationalist want to give precious Earth hours to mad people spouting gibberish about gods and resurrections? It makes no sense. Baggini, your argument is as irrrational as Christian faith. Isn't this what Baggini is actually arguing? He tells us he's an Atheist but perhaps, like most of us in Britain he was brought up in a household where parents and grandparents still believed in the Christian myths and some part of him still wants to believe in it. Rather than debating with Christians to sway them to rationality, is Baggini actually wanting to be swayed himself into believing their mumbo jumbo? Isn't he simply doing exactly what he's implying intelligent Christians do? Looking for reasons to believe. Look these Christians are intelligent so this faith thing must have something going for it. No Julian, they are faking it for financial reasons or they're just idiots.
I think it's time to put your own irrational argument forward by starting from an irrational premise in order to show how rational irrational thinking can be:
"Some believe the unbelievable because they have had religious experiences so strong that they are literally unable to doubt their veracity of. It’s hard for those of us who haven’t had such an experience to appreciate how powerful it can be. But once you accept the existence of a divine creator who has a personal relationship with you, almost anything else is possible. It is not crazy but logical to conclude that what such a God says or does will sometimes be beyond our comprehension. It follows that there is nothing irrational in accepting a story that we are unable to make sense of rationally." my italics and bold
If you start from the premise that believing the unbelievable can be ratonal then every belief is rational. This is just a faulty premise. Isn't Baggini a philosopher? What are the teaching in philosophy these days? He starts off with the premise that someone has an experience they can't explain rationally and thus everything that follows must be rational. This is a straw man, base rate fallacy, affirming the consequent, circular reasoning, confirmation bias, oh take your pick of myriad fallacy arguments.
People who have religious experiences can reasonably be compared to schizophrenics. Should we then believe the many schizophrenics who tell of the same story of mysterious people in white vans following them and manipulating them from afar? Schizophrenia is common among educated people. They often believe their delusion is real but it's reasonable thus to accept their argument even though they can't explain why they're being persecuted this way, and just them alone. It follows there's nothing irrational in accepting a story that we are unable to make sense of rationally. Fiction is real, fact is fiction, Donald Trump really was elected President, no wait, that really is real...
This is what happens when you do try to debate irrational beliefs whilst attempting to use rational concepts.
Baggini has form on this. Check out his brilliant justification for eating meat: animal welfare philosophy. In which he argues it's better to be blurry about what's right or wrong to eat than making arbitrary lines. He argues it's no less bad for ickle animals to eat meat than if you're a vegetarian who eats dairy or fish (not vegetarian, of course). This is true. However if one is vegan this argument is completely moot. So why doesn't he go vegan? Because he wants to eat meat then put forward a pseudo-argument to continue to eat meat. His logic for continuing to eat meat defies all logic though:
"We have reasons to avoid causing severe momentary pain or ongoing suffering in animals, but it gives us no reason to stop using them for our own ends altogether. A well-looked after farm animal has a better life and suffer less pain than most in the wild.
To go beyond this, you have to have some reason to believe that we should care more than about the welfare of animals at any given time. Perhaps we believe, improbably, that killing them would cut short their life projects, or, more probable in certain cases, that doing harm to them will cause deep distress to others in their group."
Or that killing them causes them severe momentary pain when we don't need to actually kill them to live. It's merely for our own pleasure. The logic then is that I cause severe momentary pain for my own pleasure. Hmmm, that doesn't sound quite so pleasant. Where be these well looked after farm animals? Does Baggini pamper his own pigs until the pleasure principle overtakes him and he puts aside the severe momentary pain qualm? But his argument gets far more illogical...
"These further reasons seem to me to be in short supply for almost all animals. To be on the safe side, I'd rather avoid killing primates, pigs, whales, elephants and the like. But cows, sheep, poultry and most fish seem to live entirely in the moment, and the only harm I could do to them would be to cause them distress while alive. So I continue to try to find liveable rules of thumb that help me to avoid this."
Huh? Pigs live more fulfilling lives thus I don't want to kill them. But cows, cows are just fucking stupid so, adios bovine. The Singer argument comes to mind. Why don't we then kill and eat severely intellectually disabled humans? Using that bizarre logic it would perfectly ethical. To be on the safe side is to be vegan surely? Idiot. But the arguments just get odder and dumber (you see, you can be both intelligent and stupid if the cognitive dissonance is needed):
"And if I fail, I really do not think that's so bad. If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities."
Pathetic (I want to carry on eating meat so...) irrational (well looked after farm animals, I'm not going to eat dolphins but I'll eat tuna) fellacious (animals used for meat experience "discomfort" similar to me bashing my hand accidentally with a hammer), oh just complete nonsense.
Over at The Independent this, call me lazy, complete idiot argues: "There's danger, though, in taking it all too seriously, and he reckons the odd bit of meat shouldn't be the end of a vegetarian's world. "I think there's a superstitious idea that by coming into contact with something you're somehow contaminated or automatically implicated in any harm that's caused by it. If you're basically eating conscientiously but make a mistake, I don't think that makes you morally culpable.""
How exactly aren't you culpable in the death of an animal if you eat some of it? It's not superstition. It's a fact. What an idiot. Actually, like religious people, he isn't an idiot in the sense of rational self-interest. It's rational for Christians to believe in Jesus if it gets them rewards in that sense just as it's rational for Baggini to suggest eating some meat isn't bad for animal's welfare if he wants to eat meat. All you do is bend reality, rationality, truth, facts, stuff like that for your own ends. Idiot.
"What atheists often forget is that many – perhaps most – religious believers are less than completely convinced anyway. Many of them are fully aware of the dissonance between what their faith and their rational mind tell them."
Apart from the straw man argument of Atheists forgetting that religious people know it's mad (who be these Atheists?) I assume most Atheists are all too well aware that religious believers have doubts. If they don't they tend to be the ones who fly planes into tall buildings. Atheism, one assumes, takes a modicum of intelligence if one is brought up in a religious society (and just about all societies are) yet I invoke the ghost of Bertrand Russell and "the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." As an Atheist my natural demeanour is doubt. I am a nihilist, which counterintuitively leads one to doubt. It's believers who are more likely to be certain (in the resurrection perhaps).
If religious people really are full of this dissonance between a faith that holds no evidence, is clearly irrational, based on faith rather than reason and their rational mind, why then do they choose the faith? To overturn logic in favour of irrational faith must mean there are some kind of self-centred rewards. That's traditionally how the thinking of children works. Why on earth would we listen to them?
"Religion offers many tools to help manage this. It tells people that faith is superior to belief based on evidence. “Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed,” Jesus told “doubting Thomas”, adding: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Religion also tells believers that doubt is to be expected, even welcomed, as part of the journey of faith, all the time reassuring them that God is beyond our understanding."
Baggini really really wants to believe. Jesus (a figure that may or may not have existed) stating in a book written at least a generation after the events, collated by people who were not there but on oral testimonies or simply embellished from other accounts that he has been seen by another who probably didn't exist then appealing thus to blind faith is not evidence in any of my dictionaries of evidence. You would simply have to have a pre-confirmed bias to believe this.
I don't know which book Baggini has read but I've read the Old and New Testament and I cannot think of a verse that welcomes doubt. The whole point of both books is not to doubt. Those that doubt aren't in for a good end. Certainly characters do doubt but they're always visited by some mystical vision or other to cast their doubt aside. As to other monotheistic religions, isn't Islam based on believing the Q'ran is the literal word of God? Where can doubt come into that?
About this time it's usual to throw in the, you believe in some sort of science thingy that you have no proof of yet still believe in it argument...
"The Easter story thus ends up rather like quantum theory: if you find it easy to believe, you haven’t understood it. Illogicality is a design feature, not a design flaw."
What? That's bamboozling isn't it? Quantum Theory is verifiable though isn't it? It's also a theory not some divine truth that one must believe on pain of an eternity of hellfire and torment. What a stupid argument. We all know that science works by verifying hypotheses. A scientific theory is not set in stone and is often challenged. But unless there's something better then it's rational to believe in evolution, quantum theory, even the more bizarre theories of string or multi-verses.
Illogicality is a design feature not a flaw? Huh? That's illogical. That's not how reason works. How weird. Quantum theory isn't illogical it's just very difficult to grasp because we don't have answers, we might never have answers to why photons change behaviour when observed but some Danish bloke did observe this, others verify it, then others try to explain why this happens.
"Anyone surprised that people manage to sustain this dissonance all their lives hasn’t been paying enough attention to what psychology has taught us about our capacities to assert contradictions. What we call our “selves” are far less unified and coherent than common sense suggests. When we say “a part of me” believes one thing and another part something else, we are being more literal than we think."
Well, unfortunately psychology is also mumbo jumbo and as unproveable as religion. Again, if one "part of you" is asserting one thing "another part" is asserting something else then you're clearly mental. There is only one of you. Your mind might be compartmentalized by, say doing a bit of the old Freud, your inner drives, the Id, your superego, the moral agent, ego, the realistic mediator but these are part of a whole, your psyche. We get, what appear to be irrational drives, say wanting to believe in Jesus, but our ego and superego override that drive by telling us that way madness lays. But the whole point of Freud's theory of the unconscious is that if your Id, the irrational driver, is running the show then you're in serious trouble.
Baggini concludes his incisive logical argument that he really wants to believe this illogical faith based mumbo jumbo by suggesting:
"Dismissing believers as simply deluded could therefore itself be a way for us atheists to deal with our own dissonance between the belief that Easter is palpable nonsense, and the awareness that seemingly intelligent people believe in it. If we really do find implausible beliefs offensive, we ought at least to have more plausible explanations for why others have them."
Ah, that's a lovely logical fallacy. Place the burden of proof on the unbeliever. Prove to me that crystals don't heal, that I can't yogically fly, that there isn't an elephant living next door.
I can be as certain as there is no god that others believe in god because they desire things like meaning, reassurance, unconditional love, that the pain of existence is worth going through because you get a reward at the end, like eating a kinder egg. No wait, that's irrational, kinder eggs probably taste nice. Scrub that. It's like eating broccoli, you know in the long run it will be good for you but in the present it tastes disgusting and looks like a venereal disease under a microscope. Pascal's wager and all that, you might as well believe in god as if you do you lose nothing. That holds for religious people, their reward is in heaven, and if it isn't, myah.
So why on earth would someone who doesn't need reassurance, unconditional love and meaning, or someone who can actually see through these desires as simple childish wants then pander to irrational belief? That would be irrational and make us no different to the people we're laughing at for their stupid crazy beliefs. Ha ha ha ha ha ha, you idiots...what's that? Blinding heavenly light, mystical voice, sense of calm and serene love...suddenly things make sense...I'm off to eat some meat, just a little bit, it won't harm the animal if I mistakenly eat it, I'm not superstitious. Just an idiot.
"Having faith is a complex business. To assume that religious people are either crazy or stupid is lazy," argues philosopher, Baggini.
This doesn't stop Baggini really really wanting to believe
"Many years ago, I had to recount the life of Jesus to a young Taiwanese student who knew nothing about Christianity. As I told him about the virgin birth, the miracles, crucifixion and resurrection, he responded with incredulous laughter."
Ha ha ha ha ha ha, yeah stupid idiots.
"Most nonbelievers in traditionally Christian cultures would show a bit more respect."
Ahem, yes, well, the uh Christian tradition has a lot of um good things to uh no, I've lost it. Why the hell should one respect irrational beliefs? That's irrational. Are we going to then say, no, don't laugh at those southern hick farmers in the US who claim to have been anally probed by space alien "greys"? Or those that believe that the alignment of planets can foresee your future? Or those that believe some people can commune with spirits of the dead, miraculously telling you things like where those keys are that you lost three years ago (inside the sofa)? Why would religion have this special expectation of respect? And isn't Baggini laughing on the inside while nodding sagely and saying yes, that's interesting, virgin birth you say? Resurrection from the dead? Ascent to heaven? Snigger.
"But inside, our reaction is often pretty much the same: how can people really believe this stuff?"
Exactly, Julian. Point out now just how nutty the Passion story is:
"Rising from the grave isn’t even the most preposterous part of the Easter story. Far more bizarre is the claim that God had to send his son to die for our sins. And if God really wanted all humanity to heed his message, why did the resurrected Christ only reveal himself to a few select people before ascending to heaven?"
Suddenly alien probing, astrology or clairvoyance seems rational in comparison. What of vociferous Atheists though?
"Vociferous atheists don’t shy away from revealing their mocking bemusement at all this."
It's vociferous now to be bemused by belief of fantasies without any evidence? What are non-vociferous Atheists, like Julian Baggini, up to then?
"Those of us who make determined efforts to understand and debate with religious believers might be too polite to admit it, but we often feel just as baffled."
Yes, well you would wouldn't you? What's the point in debating with or trying to understand someone who believes in a sky god who made the universe, for some reason then made us all sinners because one chick gave into forbidden fruit temptation so said sky god sends down his own son in physical yet also spiritual form who does carpentry for a bit, disappears for around 20 odd years then wanders about a tiny backwater of the world preaching for a few months that he's the son of god, can bring back the dead, walk on water, organize large scale picnics from next to nothing (all very useful but why not stop war, famine, etc. while you're at it?) then gets himself nailed to a cross, comes back to life and miraculously only appears to a couple of people he already knew who believed in him and then ascended to heaven and took all our sins except we continue to sin and that's why evil still exists in the world or something blah blah...?
How can you debate with anyone who believes this? It would be liking trying to debate Nietzsche's idea of eternal return with a dog. It's like trying to get my mum to understand how the internet works. It's pointless. If someone is going to believe utterly irrational ideas based on some faith that they'll be rewarded with an afterlife it's absurd to try and have a rational debate with them.
"The laziest way to try to cross this credulity gap is to shrug our shoulders and accept that people are often crazy, stupid or both."
That's lazy thinking from a philosopher. If Christian thinking is illogical, as Baggini, an Atheist, asserts then it follows that it's also crazy and stupid Oxford Dictionary: Illogical synonyms.
How is this lazy? Why would anyone bother to debate with a crazy person?
That doesn't dissuade Baggini from lazy untested assumptions when it comes to something that he wants to believe in or continue to do
Crazy, irrational, stupid, illogical, uneducated...what more does one need? So, well educated, sane, intelligent people also celebrate the resurrection. Yep, it's something that's always baffled me.
Archbishops of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and Justin Welby, both seemingly intelligent and top blokes. Yet, yet...apart from believing the whole rebounding Jesus story they are happy to dress up as wizards and preside over arcane rituals. Yet I'm assuming both do not believe their magic text as some sort of objective truth but rather project their own symbolic meaning onto it in order to both gain a pretty good living and assuage their own cognitive dissonance.
"Smart people can have blind spots," says Baggini, going on to prove his own point. "But this quick and easy explanation does not do justice to the complexities of religious belief. If we genuinely accept that a believer in the resurrection can be intelligent, but also think that any intelligent person would find the idea of the resurrection preposterous, the most charitable explanation is that intelligent believers are as aware of the implausibility of their beliefs as anyone else. This is indeed what you tend to find if you bother to talk to a Christian. They don’t use the word “miracle” for nothing – they know their faith defies laws of logic and nature."
Then, if I bothered, why would I bother? I mean, that is cognitive dissonance in action. Why would you want to discuss something that someone doesn't actually literally believe but believes nonetheless in spite of their own intelligence telling them it has to be nonsense? That's madness on a grand scale. Why on earth would any rationalist want to give precious Earth hours to mad people spouting gibberish about gods and resurrections? It makes no sense. Baggini, your argument is as irrrational as Christian faith. Isn't this what Baggini is actually arguing? He tells us he's an Atheist but perhaps, like most of us in Britain he was brought up in a household where parents and grandparents still believed in the Christian myths and some part of him still wants to believe in it. Rather than debating with Christians to sway them to rationality, is Baggini actually wanting to be swayed himself into believing their mumbo jumbo? Isn't he simply doing exactly what he's implying intelligent Christians do? Looking for reasons to believe. Look these Christians are intelligent so this faith thing must have something going for it. No Julian, they are faking it for financial reasons or they're just idiots.
I think it's time to put your own irrational argument forward by starting from an irrational premise in order to show how rational irrational thinking can be:
"Some believe the unbelievable because they have had religious experiences so strong that they are literally unable to doubt their veracity of. It’s hard for those of us who haven’t had such an experience to appreciate how powerful it can be. But once you accept the existence of a divine creator who has a personal relationship with you, almost anything else is possible. It is not crazy but logical to conclude that what such a God says or does will sometimes be beyond our comprehension. It follows that there is nothing irrational in accepting a story that we are unable to make sense of rationally." my italics and bold
If you start from the premise that believing the unbelievable can be ratonal then every belief is rational. This is just a faulty premise. Isn't Baggini a philosopher? What are the teaching in philosophy these days? He starts off with the premise that someone has an experience they can't explain rationally and thus everything that follows must be rational. This is a straw man, base rate fallacy, affirming the consequent, circular reasoning, confirmation bias, oh take your pick of myriad fallacy arguments.
People who have religious experiences can reasonably be compared to schizophrenics. Should we then believe the many schizophrenics who tell of the same story of mysterious people in white vans following them and manipulating them from afar? Schizophrenia is common among educated people. They often believe their delusion is real but it's reasonable thus to accept their argument even though they can't explain why they're being persecuted this way, and just them alone. It follows there's nothing irrational in accepting a story that we are unable to make sense of rationally. Fiction is real, fact is fiction, Donald Trump really was elected President, no wait, that really is real...
This is what happens when you do try to debate irrational beliefs whilst attempting to use rational concepts.
Baggini has form on this. Check out his brilliant justification for eating meat: animal welfare philosophy. In which he argues it's better to be blurry about what's right or wrong to eat than making arbitrary lines. He argues it's no less bad for ickle animals to eat meat than if you're a vegetarian who eats dairy or fish (not vegetarian, of course). This is true. However if one is vegan this argument is completely moot. So why doesn't he go vegan? Because he wants to eat meat then put forward a pseudo-argument to continue to eat meat. His logic for continuing to eat meat defies all logic though:
"We have reasons to avoid causing severe momentary pain or ongoing suffering in animals, but it gives us no reason to stop using them for our own ends altogether. A well-looked after farm animal has a better life and suffer less pain than most in the wild.
To go beyond this, you have to have some reason to believe that we should care more than about the welfare of animals at any given time. Perhaps we believe, improbably, that killing them would cut short their life projects, or, more probable in certain cases, that doing harm to them will cause deep distress to others in their group."
Or that killing them causes them severe momentary pain when we don't need to actually kill them to live. It's merely for our own pleasure. The logic then is that I cause severe momentary pain for my own pleasure. Hmmm, that doesn't sound quite so pleasant. Where be these well looked after farm animals? Does Baggini pamper his own pigs until the pleasure principle overtakes him and he puts aside the severe momentary pain qualm? But his argument gets far more illogical...
"These further reasons seem to me to be in short supply for almost all animals. To be on the safe side, I'd rather avoid killing primates, pigs, whales, elephants and the like. But cows, sheep, poultry and most fish seem to live entirely in the moment, and the only harm I could do to them would be to cause them distress while alive. So I continue to try to find liveable rules of thumb that help me to avoid this."
Huh? Pigs live more fulfilling lives thus I don't want to kill them. But cows, cows are just fucking stupid so, adios bovine. The Singer argument comes to mind. Why don't we then kill and eat severely intellectually disabled humans? Using that bizarre logic it would perfectly ethical. To be on the safe side is to be vegan surely? Idiot. But the arguments just get odder and dumber (you see, you can be both intelligent and stupid if the cognitive dissonance is needed):
"And if I fail, I really do not think that's so bad. If I hammer my own thumb while doing some DIY, it's not nice, but it's not the end of the world. To care obsessively about similar levels of discomfort in animals seems to be a case of mistaken moral priorities."
Pathetic (I want to carry on eating meat so...) irrational (well looked after farm animals, I'm not going to eat dolphins but I'll eat tuna) fellacious (animals used for meat experience "discomfort" similar to me bashing my hand accidentally with a hammer), oh just complete nonsense.
Over at The Independent this, call me lazy, complete idiot argues: "There's danger, though, in taking it all too seriously, and he reckons the odd bit of meat shouldn't be the end of a vegetarian's world. "I think there's a superstitious idea that by coming into contact with something you're somehow contaminated or automatically implicated in any harm that's caused by it. If you're basically eating conscientiously but make a mistake, I don't think that makes you morally culpable.""
How exactly aren't you culpable in the death of an animal if you eat some of it? It's not superstition. It's a fact. What an idiot. Actually, like religious people, he isn't an idiot in the sense of rational self-interest. It's rational for Christians to believe in Jesus if it gets them rewards in that sense just as it's rational for Baggini to suggest eating some meat isn't bad for animal's welfare if he wants to eat meat. All you do is bend reality, rationality, truth, facts, stuff like that for your own ends. Idiot.
Good old cognitive dissonance
Apart from the straw man argument of Atheists forgetting that religious people know it's mad (who be these Atheists?) I assume most Atheists are all too well aware that religious believers have doubts. If they don't they tend to be the ones who fly planes into tall buildings. Atheism, one assumes, takes a modicum of intelligence if one is brought up in a religious society (and just about all societies are) yet I invoke the ghost of Bertrand Russell and "the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." As an Atheist my natural demeanour is doubt. I am a nihilist, which counterintuitively leads one to doubt. It's believers who are more likely to be certain (in the resurrection perhaps).
If religious people really are full of this dissonance between a faith that holds no evidence, is clearly irrational, based on faith rather than reason and their rational mind, why then do they choose the faith? To overturn logic in favour of irrational faith must mean there are some kind of self-centred rewards. That's traditionally how the thinking of children works. Why on earth would we listen to them?
"Religion offers many tools to help manage this. It tells people that faith is superior to belief based on evidence. “Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed,” Jesus told “doubting Thomas”, adding: “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Religion also tells believers that doubt is to be expected, even welcomed, as part of the journey of faith, all the time reassuring them that God is beyond our understanding."
Baggini really really wants to believe. Jesus (a figure that may or may not have existed) stating in a book written at least a generation after the events, collated by people who were not there but on oral testimonies or simply embellished from other accounts that he has been seen by another who probably didn't exist then appealing thus to blind faith is not evidence in any of my dictionaries of evidence. You would simply have to have a pre-confirmed bias to believe this.
I don't know which book Baggini has read but I've read the Old and New Testament and I cannot think of a verse that welcomes doubt. The whole point of both books is not to doubt. Those that doubt aren't in for a good end. Certainly characters do doubt but they're always visited by some mystical vision or other to cast their doubt aside. As to other monotheistic religions, isn't Islam based on believing the Q'ran is the literal word of God? Where can doubt come into that?
About this time it's usual to throw in the, you believe in some sort of science thingy that you have no proof of yet still believe in it argument...
"The Easter story thus ends up rather like quantum theory: if you find it easy to believe, you haven’t understood it. Illogicality is a design feature, not a design flaw."
What? That's bamboozling isn't it? Quantum Theory is verifiable though isn't it? It's also a theory not some divine truth that one must believe on pain of an eternity of hellfire and torment. What a stupid argument. We all know that science works by verifying hypotheses. A scientific theory is not set in stone and is often challenged. But unless there's something better then it's rational to believe in evolution, quantum theory, even the more bizarre theories of string or multi-verses.
Illogicality is a design feature not a flaw? Huh? That's illogical. That's not how reason works. How weird. Quantum theory isn't illogical it's just very difficult to grasp because we don't have answers, we might never have answers to why photons change behaviour when observed but some Danish bloke did observe this, others verify it, then others try to explain why this happens.
"Anyone surprised that people manage to sustain this dissonance all their lives hasn’t been paying enough attention to what psychology has taught us about our capacities to assert contradictions. What we call our “selves” are far less unified and coherent than common sense suggests. When we say “a part of me” believes one thing and another part something else, we are being more literal than we think."
Well, unfortunately psychology is also mumbo jumbo and as unproveable as religion. Again, if one "part of you" is asserting one thing "another part" is asserting something else then you're clearly mental. There is only one of you. Your mind might be compartmentalized by, say doing a bit of the old Freud, your inner drives, the Id, your superego, the moral agent, ego, the realistic mediator but these are part of a whole, your psyche. We get, what appear to be irrational drives, say wanting to believe in Jesus, but our ego and superego override that drive by telling us that way madness lays. But the whole point of Freud's theory of the unconscious is that if your Id, the irrational driver, is running the show then you're in serious trouble.
Baggini concludes his incisive logical argument that he really wants to believe this illogical faith based mumbo jumbo by suggesting:
"Dismissing believers as simply deluded could therefore itself be a way for us atheists to deal with our own dissonance between the belief that Easter is palpable nonsense, and the awareness that seemingly intelligent people believe in it. If we really do find implausible beliefs offensive, we ought at least to have more plausible explanations for why others have them."
Ah, that's a lovely logical fallacy. Place the burden of proof on the unbeliever. Prove to me that crystals don't heal, that I can't yogically fly, that there isn't an elephant living next door.
I can be as certain as there is no god that others believe in god because they desire things like meaning, reassurance, unconditional love, that the pain of existence is worth going through because you get a reward at the end, like eating a kinder egg. No wait, that's irrational, kinder eggs probably taste nice. Scrub that. It's like eating broccoli, you know in the long run it will be good for you but in the present it tastes disgusting and looks like a venereal disease under a microscope. Pascal's wager and all that, you might as well believe in god as if you do you lose nothing. That holds for religious people, their reward is in heaven, and if it isn't, myah.
So why on earth would someone who doesn't need reassurance, unconditional love and meaning, or someone who can actually see through these desires as simple childish wants then pander to irrational belief? That would be irrational and make us no different to the people we're laughing at for their stupid crazy beliefs. Ha ha ha ha ha ha, you idiots...what's that? Blinding heavenly light, mystical voice, sense of calm and serene love...suddenly things make sense...I'm off to eat some meat, just a little bit, it won't harm the animal if I mistakenly eat it, I'm not superstitious. Just an idiot.
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