If "reason" is your enemy, then you better believe I am too.

What do you say to this?

Is the church, or the members thereof, actually willing to argue and be proud that to have faith, it must supplant reason?

These kinds of statements, arguments, positions are the reasons I have grown to despise faith - even the "polite" kind that isn't attacking me. Because the polite kind, the kind that wants to have it's views without condemning or arguing with mine, still acts as a segment in the pole holding up the tent that covers the rest of the genuinely "are you fucking kidding me?" crazy faith - the kind that says kill your kid with your bare hands if you think the "devil" is inside him.

Every argument, religious or otherwise, involves reason.

Want proof?

Even the most "faithful" of believers uses "reason" in their every instantaneous movement, decision, and intention. People don't put their hand on a stove they know is hot because reason tells them (maybe from experience) that there would be REAL consequences to ignoring what they know about hot stoves and how badly human skin reacts to that kind of heat.


I got into a fight - online, mind you, but if I were standing next to him in person his ears would have been ringing from the volume of my shouting - with a guy who DENIED - just flat out waved his dick in the air and DENIED that any atheist does not have faith.

I stand in living proof that the asshole is gaping, hairy, and WRONG. I do not have faith, I have REASON.

So this dumb bastard just kept arguing with me. (there's a larger point I must save for another discussion about blaming someone who is getting more angry as you proceed; he acknowledges you are getting angry, He acknowledges that he knows he is the reason the other is getting angry, that person plods forward - either oblivious or belligerent - and just says he has untrammelled freedom to say whatever he wants to say....who then you throws up a red flag and decries that the OTHER GUY (the angry one) - well, his reactions must have limits.

Got that? You can say whatever you want; but if the other guy is angry, and targeting you - he has limits. I wonder if that person would see a bear at the zoo, beneath a sign that says "do not feed the bear"; tear the sign down, feed the bear, and then blame the bear for mauling the dumb bastard who gave him a slice of his pizza and lost and arm for his generosity.

That's reason - to know enough that a bear will eat you, you don't give the bear the chance -

...faith is that in an argument, you have "faith" that the law will protect you even when the other guy is pointing a gun at you and screaming for you to shut the fuck up, you keep yammering....and then your relatives want the cops and the courts to clean it all up and punish the other guy ex post facto.

Would it not be more "reasonable" to say, "Hmm, this conversation is not going anywhere productive, the other guy doesn't look healthy or restrained, I probably ought not to feed that particular bear".

Faith says carry on, you will be protected.

Now there's another argument that I'm basically claiming hostile tactics must be respected, and I'm not. Shooting someone who says something you don't like is unwarranted. Punching him in the face is not even allowed; after all their just words.

But at some point, when you hold up your hand and say "this argument is not healthy, let's stop", and the other guy thinks it's great to have this kind of tension out in the open - says it's "healthy" for the community for these kinds of things to be aired out -

I call bullshit, and I'm using reason as my basis.

Having the law punish someone for an illegal act after it's too late to repair the damage the conflict inspired is dumb. Unless you believe that it serves some greater purpose, perhaps the will of some god, in which case the reasonable person should still rightly call you galactically and shamelessly stupid.

Humans have big brains and opposible thumbs. These two characteristics are supposed to set us apart (and above, we claim) the other animals on the planet. But whenever we, collectively or individually, make such stupid decisions in the light of our capacity to reason - like war and economic collapse - what basis are we using at that point to claim we're better than all the "lesser" animals?

We were smart enough to see the problem coming.

We had the means to stop it,

but our ego, our hubris, or grossly unjustifiable overconfidence in our own noble justifications (in the light of all the ignoble ones) allowed us to fuck up just as bad as the dumb "lesser" animals who never had any chance to make the right decision.

We did - do.

We make those choices based on a body of logic, casually referred to as "reason".

If that's your enemy,

I'm building a fence between you and me, and I'm going to bean anything that comes over the top with a big, sharp rock at the very least.

If reason is your enemy,

then so am I.

and I do not, will not,

ever

apologize for your duplicity.

Gaping Asshole said that it was faith that I used, as an atheist, in order to convince myself it was OK to drive across a bridge.

I said it was reason that gave me confidence to drive across the bridge because I understood the underlying mechanics that made the voyage possible.

I argued that "faith" - the believe that there are unseen forces at work, and those unseen forces will act in ways that are impossible to imagine or explain - if I felt "faith" would get me to the other side no matter what,

...then I should not even need a bridge, should I?

Faith says that (whatever it might be that I would have faith in) will get me to the other side of that chasm with or without a bridge.

Confidence, I argued, that is based on reason, is what allows me to proceed across the bridge; I understand many of the fundamental laws of physics, enough of the laws of engineering and mechanics, enough of the principles and practices of modern construction to know that the bridges I traverse will support me and whatever else is on it.

On those days I don't (I can show you that bridge) I don't drive across the fucking thing, because I don't have FAITH that will save me when the goddamn bridge fails. (the limit on the bridge says 12 tons; it's the main road on the way to a coal-fired power plant that someone I know used to work at; I saw the log books and the trucks that cross that bridge weighed over 30 tons loaded, and they were NOT the only thing on that bridge.

So I used "reason" to say that the extra five miles to go around that bridge were worth my time and fuel, faith was not involved in the process.

And said dickhead, his name was John C. Howell of Beaverton Oregon, with a smile on his face and claiming that such arguments were healthy for the entire community that was there to watch it, kept on insisting that all atheists have faith.

And nobody could understand why I got pissed.

I don't have faith.

I have REASON, and REASON gives me 'confidence'.

John said they were synonymous and interchangeable.

I present to you the above photo, which proves that I'm not the only one who thinks they are not the same, and the others who agree with me are not always atheists.

Religious people have as much contempt for logic and reason as they insist that I do for their faith. They take for granted that everyone else will treat them according to social customs and legal precedent, many (most) of which are not based on superstition or conjecture, but on reasoned arguments presented in an open society and only agreed upon after it is found to be acceptable to as many of the crowd that can be called on to support it.

We suspend "reason" when there is no explanation - and we supplant it with "well, 'G'od must have had one (he always does, I am told) even if 'H'e never explains it to us"

And that gives me no comfort what so fucking ever.

That it gives others comfort is great, I won't take their faith away from them, as long as their faith or their support thereof is not being used to take my comfort - reason, logic, and healthy skepticism - away from me.

And this seems to have some bearing on the conflicts of our age; all ages in fact, and not just the conflicts unique to me.

You want to go through life with your thumb to your nose in the face of reason? Feel free. But the First Amendment says I can't take it away from you, it does not say I have to support you, encourage you, or in any conflict or exchange, if the faithful chooses to pit their faith against my reason, nobody is going to argue with me (and expect to win) by saying the First Amendment protects their faith, but not my reason.

Particularly if these hypocritical louts are going to start insisting that atheism is a religion. I think they bit themselves in the ass on that one - because if "atheism" is a "religion", then would atheists not also deserve all the rights and privileges of all the religions who want to blame atheist as the root of all evil?

Ooops.

Listen - read - I dont' care what you believe in. But in a symbiotic society where we must interact, engage, and even at times depend on one another, there has to be a mutual agreement of respect.

Religious people say atheists are disrespectful of their faith; I typically respond that all atheists can not be held responsible for the actions of a few - for if that were true, I've got some Christians who they had better answer for and fast -

but the larger point is that to hold up faith as not just an alternative to reason, but a better one - a preferred one - is such rank hypocrisy that I will not tolerate it. Faithful people are far more dependent on reason than I am on faith. In fact, you try to show a faithful person what it looks like when reason is abandoned -

like me saying "I dont' give a fuck about your religion, you're a liar, a fool, and I'm not going to let you destroy my country" - well, they don't like that.

But they will then turn around and say the same thing to me as an atheist.

I find that unreasonable.

and I do not stand for it.

So if you see me, as an atheist, getting rather animated, loud, and arguably hostile in the face of some devoutly faithful people,

please don't try to argue that you always know the atheist started it; or at least dont' fall back on the First Amendment argument when there are so many Christians making the accusation that atheism is a religion as a perjorative statement. If it casts aspersions for atheism to be regarded like a religion, then why?

Is it because they think atheists make claims that they find unreasonable, and they use reason in the argument to make their point?

Checkmate.

“I don’t need to wear a seat belt. I have an airbag.”

“I don’t need to wear a seat belt - I have an airbag.” I was involved in a T-bone collision with a full size pickup truck. I had the brakes applied, anti-lock was working on dry pavement and had brought it down from 40 to about 15 miles per hour, while driving a 1998 Saturn SL-1. My girlfriend at the time was in the passenger seat; her 3 year old son was in a car seat in the back. All three of us wore seatbelts. We all walked away with minor injuries.

My injury was to the wrist as somehow the airbag deployment snapped it backwards and stretched my tendons. My girlfriend saw the impending collision and turned to see her son in the back seat, so when the airbag deployed, the airbag bounced her heat into the A-pillar of the car and she had a minor concussion. The child in the back seat bit his lip, as the type of car seat he had consisted of a padded bar that went across his lap, with no shoulder belt.

But we all walked away under our own power. The kid was giggling and asking to “ride again”.

When we went to the body shop to retrieve personal effects from our car, we took pictures of our car for archival purposes. The receptionist at the body shop gave the photo below of another car in the lot near mine. There are a few things of particular importance to me:

This is a 2000 Mitsubishi Eclipse, (Go ahead, ask me how I know) and since the photo was taken late in 1999, it’s obvious this car didn’t survive more than a few months in the hands of it’s owner before it was wrecked. It appears to be a sideways glance into a guard rail or other vehicle, indicating loss of control for one or another reason. Now look at the windshield. Notice the characteristic starburst where a human head makes contact with laminated safety glass. Auto glass is actually two plates of glass formed under vacuum and high temperature with a plastic film between them. This obviously can’t keep the glass from shattering, but it does help all those little pieces from flying so freely as they normally would.

But the airbag can clearly be seen as the white mound on top of the dashboard. It is clear that whoever thought the airbag would substitute for a seatbelt found out by experiment that the inertia of a human body will vault it right over the airbag until that body finds some other force strong enough to stop it. The only real question I wish I could ask of the occupant of that seat is if they wear a seatbelt now.

There is another image that I carry only in my mind, as I had no camera at the time. But twenty years later it is still vivid. A friend I met my sophomore year in college was involved in a collision and we made a similar trip to a junkyard to take the stereo out of her car. Next to it in the junkyard was a full-size Chevrolet van, vintage 1980. A similar starburst was visible in the passenger-side windshield, of course minus any evidence of an airbag as there were none available in vans of that era. But what I can’t erase from my mind is the shape of the web of cracks: there were two centers where the radial cracks started and spread outward, one larger than the other in the center of the left side of the windshield, and a smaller radial set of cracks just below it and a bit towards the outside of the van.

If you don’t have the same mental image now that I have, what I see is a small child in the lap of an adult, the adult so convinced that he or she could protect the child from harm just by holding it, both being thrown head-first into the glass when the adult was proven wrong. I don’t want to know the truth about that particular collision because I choose to believe that somehow the child survived. Typically in such cases the adult does live, since their impact with the dash and the windshield was ‘cushioned’ by the softer child in front of them, and of course the child’s impact is compounded by having the additional force of an adult that weighs five to ten times as much as they do forcing them into the dashboard and windshield. It is images like this that fill me with rage when I see children in other cars who are not buckled into safety seats or even wearing a seat belt at all.

There is another pathetic footnote to this story. The child in my car was not mine; he belonged to my girlfriend and after a nice Christmas celebration we were driving him back to his father’s house. His father was mentally retarded and lived with his parents and two brothers who were also affected. They arrived at the hospital in their own car while we were being transported by ambulance, and two things happened that day which also make me cringe with disbelief whenever I recall them.

There is always so much mayhem and confusion in an emergency room, at least from the patient’s point of view. Add to that a family of people who are less than remarkable themselves, and it adds considerably to the hysteria. The child only had a small cut to his lower lip and was still in good spirits as he still thought all the excitement still must be some sort of celebration. But his father and his two brothers were all milling around telling stories and his parents (the grandparents of the boy) were quiet but confused. The nurses brought a clipboard of papers into the emergency room, asked who was responsible for the child, and the father raised his hand. The nurse told him where to sign in about seven places and he lazily scribbled his name where instructed, and then picked up the child and told everyone it was time to go home, which they did.

Now I was told this is what happened by a nurse, because I was with my girlfriend who had been taken for skull X-rays. Imagine our shock when we returned to the ER and we were met by half a dozen panicked nurses who were asking us where the child was. We said we didn’t know, but placed a call to the father’s house and of course that’s where everyone was. When we told the grandmother that all of those papers the father had signed were not a release form but granting permission for the doctors to examine the child – which none ever had – and that he needed to bring the child immediately back to the hospital, she said, “Oh, he’s fine. We’re staying right here.” I went to the house and took the child back to the hospital later that night, with everyone at the father’s house oblivious to the legal implications of what they had done and still berating me it was a waste of my time.

Now keep that thought in the back of your head for later.

That’s not the worst part of this story. The boy’s car seat was obviously still in my car, which was somewhere on it’s way to or already at the body shop at that point. But despite the fact that the father normally had custody of the child (both legally and physically) they had two cars but only one child seat. And of course on that day the car they took to the hospital was not the one with the child seat in it. You’ve figured this out now, I’m sure: only two hours after being in a car accident, the same child who survived a collision because he was buckled into a safety seat was taken home from the hospital in a car without a car seat and not wearing a seat belt. How do I know he wasn’t even wearing a seat belt? Because his father had jammed quarters into the seat belt buckles to keep that light on the dashboard from coming on and that buzzer from annoying them when they drive.

Do you still want to tell me that I’m not supposed to get upset about things like this?

An optimist? Therein lies no hope, they are dreaming

"

an optimist is one who believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist is one who fears that this is probably true.

- J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan project that brought the world, for better or worse, nuclear weapons.