Wednesday, 22nd of November, 2006

I hate Ben Peek. He reviewed my band's album launch, so now I have to go and buy his damn book from Wheatland Press (and while I was there I had to buy Polyphony 6, edited by Deborah Layne from Wheatland and Jay Lake) and review it.
Terribly cheap to PayPal from Wheatland, so don't feel weirded out by buying a Sydney author's book from Oregon. Although, let's face it, even the wonderful Wheatland site isn't as pretty as the new FourPlay online shop, so maybe Ben will hate me right back.

Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, written by Ben Peek, illustrated by Anna Brown, and a cover by Andrew Macrae. Buy it from Amazon, buy it from Wheatland Press.

PS isn't that cover awesome? I hate Andrew Macrae too. But not as much as Ben Peek.

Friday, 17th of November, 2006

I've seen this incredibly stupid article linked from a couple of blogs recently — it's called "It's not easy being an atheist", and it's by Pastor Steven W Cornell, a man who clearly prefers not to think too hard about worldviews other than his own.
Anyway, go and read it for today's dose of supreme wrong-headedness, and then, via the always-reliable PZ Myers, you can read Southern Fried Skeptic's response: “It's not easy being a christian”, which pulls Cornell up for misrepresentation and use of straw men and does a beautiful job of rebutting each of Cornell's points with a matching Christian straw man.

The trouble with someone like Cornell writing about what it must be like to be an atheist is that he's categorically unable to break out of his own blinkered world-view, and therefore everything about life gets defined in a Christian's straightjacketed way – morality cannot exist without god/faith, existence is a miracle, life without god must lack "ultimate" purpose… But hey, c'mon, there's more craziness than that in the guy's article, if you're up for it:

The atheist must also deny the validity of historical proof. If he accepted the standard rules for testing the truth claims of historical documents, he would be forced to accept the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The account of Jesus' resurrection is strongly validated by standard rules for judging historical accuracy. The extensive manuscript evidence of eyewitnesses to the resurrection is presented in an unbiased, authentic manner. It is the atheist's anti-supernatural bias that keeps him from allowing history to prove anything.

Never mind all of the inconsistencies between the different gospels' accounts; it's presented in an "authentic manner", folks, so that's all there is to it!
Oh, and before that, there's “The atheist must also suppress the demands of logic”, which turns out to just be the usual simple-minded intelligent design crap.

Getting back to blinkered worldviews, the most interesting thing about these kinds of people is how they couch everything in terms of "denying" god, being "biased against" god. Sorry mate, the thing is, you have to have a pretty good reason to get god into the discussion in the first place. As I've mentioned before (I think), many of us atheists (yes, I have the grammar right there) do not consider our position a rejection of theism/deism/religion as such at all. Ours is the natural way to understand the world — there just isn't any good reason or need to introduce some kind of supernatural, transcendent element.
Of course, you can have a transcendent experience within the physical world; after all, we are finite beings. But there's no good evidence to suggest that the universe isn't finite too, albeit very large. Very, very large. Immense, in fact. Sorry. But yes, experiences that take us out of our normal embodied/constrained mode of perception, experiences that seem to touch on something far greater than ourselves — sure. What makes you think you're touching on something infinite, though? What reason do you have for declaring that it's something radically other, something non-physical, not itself constrained to the laws of the universe?
You have no reason. When you realise how massive, powerful, powerfully creative, and complex the universe as apprehended by science really is, you simply have no reason.

(PS Please don't be offended by this post's title if you're religious yourself; I'm not necessarily talking about you, but jumpin' jehosophat, this guy really is an idiot!)