Response to conservative Christians celebrating Rittenhouse acquittal

You guys are such a great witness for the guy who told people to turn the other cheek and sacrificed his life to save others, even though he had the power to kill anyone who threatened him. No wonder so many people are leaving the church.

If only you looked at Kyle's victims and saw Jesus (Matthew 25:45), maybe you'd understand why other people don't see this as a cause for celebration.

Maybe if you saw them as human beings instead of a faceless enemy (with faults, yes, but that doesn't mean they deserved to die), you would wish for a resolution where nobody got killed instead of celebrating that the killer won't face any consequences (and inspire many more killers to come).

Maybe if you cared about human life, not just fetal life, you'd mourn the loss of these human lives.

Maybe if you interpreted these experiences thru the lens of scripture, instead of interpreting scripture thru the lens of your politics, you wouldn't be celebrating something that is DIRECTLY the opposite of what Jesus explicitly stood for.

Are conservative (or liberal) Christians "not real Christians"? Are they just reading into the Bible what fits with the worldview they already had?

Having seen both sides of it now (I grew up in a conservative Christian home thinking liberal Christians were not really Christian at all; now I'm a liberal atheist who finds a lot more common ground with liberal Christians than conservative atheists), I really feel that both conservative and liberal Christians start with a general side of the political spectrum (you can even take out the conservative/liberal political dichotomy and just call it legalism vs. empathy), and then connect with the parts of the Bible which support that basic worldview. There's too much of the Bible that isn't internally coherent, so the only way to make sense of dozens of books written over hundreds of years by a bunch of different authors is to have some basic starting points to know which parts you accept at face value and which parts you reinterpret to fit with the parts they contradict.

It's easy to say "oh, those people aren't really Christian" (whichever ones you disagree with). I think the reality is that Christians on both sides are earnestly trying to follow half of the Bible and casually tossing out the other half. That isn't something fake Christians do, it's something all Christians necessarily must do, because the Bible is a big book of multiple choice that doesn't have any single coherent worldview. I think an earnest reading of the Bible with a sincere desire to follow what it says makes conservatives more conservative and liberals more liberal. The fact that someone reads it and comes away with ideas like Westboro Baptist Church doesn't mean those people were hateful already and they just read into the Bible what they wanted to see. But the fact that a sincere and devout reading of the Bible can turn people into hateful monsters like that also doesn't mean that liberals reading the Bible and coming away with a bunch of bleeding-heart hippy-dippy love stuff are reading into it stuff that isn't there. Both sides of the ideological spectrum are truly and accurately contained within the disparate lessons taught in that diverse collection of writings.

Don't atheists have faith in science just like religious people have faith in God?

In a sense, that is correct, but only in a very simplistic sense. Religious people who make this argument would do well to heed their own counter-arguments when we atheists say that faith is not a virtue. One of the ways religious people respond to that criticism is to say that "faith" doesn't necessarily mean "blind faith;" it can also mean "justified faith" (as in, "I have faith that Steve is a loyal friend because he's proven his loyalty over and over again"). Blind faith is believing something without any meaningful evidence, whereas justified faith is being convinced of something because of evidence, but recognizing that due to the problem of induction, you can never be 100% sure that there isn't some further compelling evidence in the other direction that you just aren't aware of. I think we can have justified faith in the scientific method and the scientific community.

In my case, I did a lot of personally examining the evidence in favor of evolution; I was actually so indoctrinated by creationism that I continued to believe evolution was dumb even after I stopped being a Christian. But then eventually I decided that I should look into the evolutionist rebuttals to creationist claims, and I found the rebuttals to be far more convincing, and backed up by far more evidence. And whereas creationists claimed that evolutionists were just dishonestly propagating a science they knew was false to validate a specific worldview, the creationists were the ones who openly acknowledged that they would simply ignore or discard any evidence which goes against the conclusions they already had going in.

Bottom line, my examination of the evolution issue was pretty thorough and in-depth, and I don't really think I believe in evolution based on faith (even justified faith) in the scientific community. Yes, there are always things that we don't experience firsthand, but there has to be a limit of reasonable skepticism to what information we doubt just because we didn't experience it firsthand (analogy: somebody doubts that a certain law was passed, and you show them the text of the law straight from congress.gov, but that doesn't convince them because hackers could've just planted false information on the official government website; yes, it is technically possible, but it's outside the realm of reasonable likelihood). If a person is going to be that skeptical and that demanding of firsthand experiential information, then I would fully expect that they're only applying that extreme level of skepticism to worldviews they disagree with, because there's no way their own beliefs would hold up to the same demand (unless, perhaps, their own worldview is full-blown solipsism).

Anyway, bit of a tangent. The point is that I have investigated evolution myself quite thoroughly, and found the position of mainstream science to have far more hard evidence to support it. So then, when people attack the position of mainstream science on issues like climate change or vaccinations, I see a lot of similarities between their lines of attack on those issues and creationism. I haven't done a tenth of the research about climate change that I've done about evolution, so yes, I do have some degree of "faith" in the scientific community on that issue, but it's faith that is justified by my more in-depth examination of how science gets the job done on the issue of evolution (and some other minor issues that were quicker and easier to research).

So that's the main way that I would respond to this criticism, but there is one other small point worth mentioning. I think another way our "faith" in science is different from the religious faith that many believers have is that it's subject to change in light of new information. There are many religious people who actually take pride in the fact that their beliefs wouldn't change no matter what new information came to light (like William Lane Craig saying that the ultimate evidence which supersedes everything else is "the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit," i.e. a gut feeling). But the thing about having some degree of trust in the scientific community is that you recognize it's just humans doing the best they can, not some divine word from on high, so I think that makes it much easier to be humble and accept that we should be open to new information potentially changing our position, instead of blindly walking in lock-step with whatever mainstream scientists believe at the time. But I do think that once you've done enough research for yourself to see that mainstream science isn't just some shadowy cabal of people trying to foist a specific conclusion on the unsuspecting public to support some selfish worldview, then it does make sense to take an "innocent until proven guilty" approach to the mainstream scientific consensus on an issue. Because, as others have said, it works; it gets results.

Why do so many Evangelicals like Trump?

(This is something I wrote down as a reply to a Facebook comment in February 2017, and had it saved in a Word document. I decided to upload it now because it really hasn't stopped being relevant.)

Since the Trump administration began, and President Trump has begun to work aggressively at the goal of fulfilling all our worst fears about him, I’ve heard people express amazement that anyone can still believe anything Trump says, or support anything he does. I don’t exactly think of myself as an anti-theist, but I do think that my atheistic perspective has given me a viewpoint on this question that the average person may not have. From this viewpoint, I’ve developed a hypothesis as to why people continue to support Donald Trump despite all he’s done to prove himself utterly dishonest and unqualified.

In simplest terms, my idea is that a certain type of religious person is primed by their religious upbringing to think about things dogmatically. Before I go any further, let me say that I do fully understand that there are religious people who analyze their beliefs critically and make some effort to only believe true things (though I think many of them have a flawed starting point or epistemology, but that's a different discussion). However, there are far too many Christians who just believe because that's what they've been told all their lives. Think about it; practically any Christian home teaches their kids that God is real and the Bible is true from a young age. They don't wait till the child reaches the age of reason, and then say, “read some Aquinas on one side and some Ingersoll on the other, and then use the critical-thinking skills we taught you to decide for yourself if you agree with our beliefs.” (I tend to think that if Christianity were true, Christian parents should have no fear of doing that, but that’s also a different discussion.)

So, for those children being taught that Christianity is true from a young age (which seems to be practically all children raised in Christian homes), the first, initial reason that they believe the truth-claims of Christianity is, “I believe it’s true because my parents believe it’s true.” Later on, that might turn into, “I believe it’s true because the Bible says it’s true,” or “I believe it's true because my pastor/friends/spouse believe it’s true.” Until they actually look at the reasons behind their beliefs for themselves, then they are only believing dogmatically. My theory is that, the longer a person believes in religion dogmatically, the easier it is to believe in other things dogmatically. If you just blindly accept what your parents/pastor/spouse/etc. says about religion, then why wouldn't you also blindly accept what they say about politics, economics, current events, and so forth?

But the more you blindly accept things and believe things dogmatically, the more you build up a foundation of unwarranted presuppositions that inform your future conclusions. If you think Evangelical Christianity is the right and true flavor of Christianity (because someone said it and you accepted it dogmatically), then you’ll think conservative values are the right and true values for Christians to hold. If conservative values are the right and true values for Christians to hold, then the Republican Party is obviously more honorable and Christian than the Democratic Party. If the Republican Party is obviously more honorable and Christian than the Democratic Party, then the news sources which bolster the Republicans and bash the Democrats (such as Fox News) must be the most accurate and honest news sources. If Fox News says that Trump is actually pretty good and Hillary is completely terrible, then Trump must actually be pretty good. If Trump is actually pretty good, then when he signs an order banning immigrants, there must be a pretty good reason for doing that.

That's an over-simplification for the sake of illustration, but the point is that you can reach conclusions through sound deduction and critical thinking, but the conclusions are completely false, because the premises of those deductions were the result of believing in false claims dogmatically. A person can be completely rational in believing Trump's nonsense (but working from deeply-flawed starting points), or it could just be that they’re believing him dogmatically too. Either way, my theory is that it's the result of being conditioned by religion to accept things dogmatically and uncritically.

The late anti-theist Christopher Hitchens, in his defense of his book “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” argued that even the worst inhumanities of an atheist dictator like Stalin still had religion to blame, because Stalin rode on the coattails of the religious mindset that the masses were steeped in before he took over. He used the language and symbolism of religion, tapped into the parts of their minds that had been made more credulous and uncritical by religion, and then simply replaced church with state.

Christopher Hitchens is a great icon to many atheists, but I personally thought this particular argument was a bit of a reach... until November 8^th, 2016. I think we're seeing an eerie echo of everything he described coming to pass. It's not an exact copy; Trump is using church power to get state power, instead of outright replacing church with state. But he's still using the way that a certain type of religious mind (which apparently accounts for 80% of white Evangelicals) is conditioned to accept things dogmatically, instead of analyzing them critically. Someone with such a mindset would have no reason to not continue believing in and trusting Trump, even after all the insanity and un-Christ-like behavior of his administration so far. That’s the power of dogma, and I still say that religion is the most powerful purveyor of dogma out there.

Isn’t it meaningful that all the disciples died for their beliefs?

William Lane Craig (one of the most passionate defenders of the resurrection as a historical event) and many other Christian apologists use this argument from martyrdom with stubborn regularity. It makes sense to some degree, because if it is true, it’s a very powerful argument for a transformative experience outside of themselves. But there are two problems with this argument. The first one is pretty huge; there’s no real solid evidence I could find that any of the disciples did die for their beliefs at all. And it’s not just because I was only looking at skeptical sources; even the Christian websites I found couldn’t come up with anything better than “second-century church tradition.” The lack of historicity for this claim should be made clear by the fact that Craig himself (who’s fond of using arguments from authority to bolster his claims) doesn’t even try to back this one up with a quote from a scholar or a blanket statement of scholarly consensus. Generally, the only specific evidence he cites for this claim is a passage in Josephus about James, as seen here:

According to the first century Jewish historian Josephus, James was martyred for his faith in Christ in the late AD 60s. Now most of us have brothers. What would it take to convince you that your brother is the Lord, such that you would be ready to die for that belief? Can there be any doubt that this remarkable transformation in Jesus’ younger brother took place because, in Paul’s words, “then he appeared to James”?

Even in a written piece like this (which doesn’t have the time restrictions of formal debates), Craig can only provide any actual citation for a single one of those many disciples who supposedly went to their deaths refusing to deny their belief in the risen Lord. As far as I’ve ever seen, there is no historical evidence that most of the disciples were martyred, prior to second-century church tradition. And yet, Christian apologists keep right on stating this as fact, without bothering to ever produce any sources that can validate such a high level of confidence in its historical accuracy (seemingly, because they don’t actually have any). That seems intellectually dishonest to me.

Now, I think that in itself should be enough to cast serious doubt on this point, but there is a second factor that needs to be considered. Even if some of the disciples were killed, it only has significance to the strength of their belief if they were killed after being given a chance to recant. If someone puts a gun to your head and says, “admit you were lying or I’ll kill you,” and you stick to your story, then that’s pretty strong evidence that you really believe it. But if you’re walking down the street, and someone just shoots you without making any such challenge, then it says absolutely nothing about whether you really believed whatever it was you were claiming. So, for this claim (that the disciples went to their deaths unwilling to recant) to be substantiated, there has to be historical evidence not only that they were killed, but also that it only happened after they were given a chance to recant. Now, let’s look at the passage from Josephus about James that William Lane Craig offered as such profound evidence for this argument. It fails that criterion on both levels. It does not indicate that James was given a chance to recant his belief that Jesus rose before he was executed, and it doesn’t even indicate that this belief was why he was executed in the first place. Contrary to how Craig describes it, there is no indication in Josephus that “James was martyred for his faith in Christ,” or that he specifically did “die for that belief.” It’s actually remarkably vague about the reasons for his execution, which makes it easy to read between the lines that his seditious faith in Jesus as his savior was the real reason, but only if you already believed that going in. Assumption is not evidence.

In my perception, the passage about James in Josephus is the most oft-cited evidence of martyrdom by one of the disciples who allegedly saw the risen Christ, and yet this is how thin it is. It’s like saying that someone who claimed to be an alien abductee was killed in a mugging, so that must mean he really believed he was abducted. It’s an argument that sounds very dramatic and compelling at first blush, but doesn’t hold up when you actually look closer at what evidence the proponents of this argument are citing to substantiate their claim.

Do you think religious people would change their beliefs if the existence of alien life were proven?

I couldn't disagree with that idea more strongly. You have to understand the psychology of belief, that when religion is a deeply-integrated part of a person's identity, they don't change their beliefs when provided with new information; they filter that information through the beliefs they already have and refuse to give up.

I'll give you two anecdotes which I think illustrate how some religious people would react to this (and that's not even considering the people whose religious beliefs are legitimately compatible with the existence of aliens). The first is personal, the second is a public figure. The personal one is myself; I used to be very religious. I remember one time back in those days, I started to watch the movie Paul (by that time, I was cool with R-rated movies despite being very morally conservative). There's a point in the movie where the two guys and the alien run into a fundie Christian, and the alien says his existence "disproves the notion of the Abrahamic, Judeo-Christian God." I actually turned the movie off right then and there, not because it was blasphemous, but because I disagreed so passionately with the assertion that the existence of aliens would disprove my beliefs. Mind you, I didn't have any well-thought-out theological ideas about how the existence of aliens would coexist with the truth claims of Christianity, I basically just thought, "Christianity is obviously true, whether aliens exist or not. The end."

Now, the public figure; Ken Ham. This blog post from AIG gained some mainstream attention when Huffington Post reported on it with the headline "Creationist Ken Ham Says Aliens Will Go To Hell So Let’s Stop Looking For Them." In fact, the main thrust of the post is that aliens obviously don't exist, because the Bible says that people and animals were created by God, not evolved, so there's no reason to think there would be any living organisms on any other planets. He even ludicrously claims that the whole reason scientists are trying so hard to find alien life is to disprove creation so they'll have free rein to rebel against God. That seems to go right along with your theory that if the existence of aliens was proven, religious people would abandon their beliefs, right? But look closer; there is a point in the post where Ham says, "Now the Bible doesn’t say whether there is or is not animal or plant life in outer space," and later, "this means that any aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but because they are not Adam’s descendants, they can’t have salvation." So, within this whole rant about how we should stop looking for alien life because aliens obviously don't exist from a Biblical standpoint, he's still not going so far as to claim that the existence of aliens and the truth of the Bible are utterly incompatible. He's essentially making a falsifiable claim, but with the back-door exit already wide open if that claim is ever actually falsified.

If "we" find out that aliens exist, then the first step for fundamentalist religious people will be to simply deny the truthfulness of that claim (just as they already do with evolution, because they believe it contradicts their beliefs as well). When the evidence becomes too strong to deny (like, if aliens live among us), then they'll shift to claiming that their beliefs were always consistent with the existence of aliens, and will even find verses of scripture that they can twist to claim that the Bible (or whatever other scripture they believe in) already told us that aliens exist, so it must be inspired by God because no human could've known that way back then.

Flat-earth theory is a good real-world analogue to show both stages of the process. There are people who still vehemently oppose the idea of a spherical earth, because they believe that the Bible indicates the earth is flat. Conversely, there are people who point to verses like Isaiah 40:22 as the Bible presciently acknowledging that the earth is a sphere, even though the vast majority of translations interpret the word as "circle," which is a flat, two-dimensional shape.

The most ludicrous example I've ever heard of this (a person trying to twist the words of the Bible to make it seem like it indicates foreknowledge of modern scientific discoveries) was from Hugh Ross. He said that the Bible talks about the universe being constantly expanding; my ears perked up when I heard this, because I've read the Bible a few times, and certainly didn't recall seeing that. So then, he read the verse that he claimed supported that contention. It was actually the latter part of that same verse, Isaiah 40:22, which says God "stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in." I'm sorry, do curtains or tents continuously and endlessly expand throughout all time? Of course not, they expand to a certain size and then stop. This verse is obviously not saying anything about the universe constantly expanding. All Ross did was take what we've learned through real scientific discovery and combine it with his dogmatic belief that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and then interpreted what it says through that framework. There's nothing about the proven existence of aliens that would make it impossible for people like him to continue using that approach.

Do you believe morals are objective or subjective?

I’ve recently been thinking about the distinction between values being objective or subjective, while playing Football Tactics, a video game about soccer. The way the standings work in this soccer game (I'm assuming it's based on how they work in real leagues, but I'm not familiar enough with soccer to know for sure) is a points system, where a team gets 3 points for winning a match and 1 point for a draw (there’s no overtime). If two teams have the same number of points, then their ranking is decided by “Goal Difference” (the number of goals they’ve scored, subtracted by the number of goals their opponents have scored). 

Now, is this ranking system objective or subjective? One could argue that it’s subjective because the decision to use that system was just some people’s opinion; it’s not like that’s the way it has to be. Someone else could argue that it’s objective, because deciding what rank a team should have at any given time is based on hard numbers and concrete data, not anyone’s feelings or opinion about which team is better (the way college football rankings used to work before the BCS was established). What this has made me realize is that it would probably be helpful in discussions of whether a value system is objective or subjective, if we draw a line between “origin” (how a certain value system came to be established), and “implementation” (how it is judged whether something is good or bad in a value system, after it has been established). 

Even with that distinction, the more I work through this thought process, the more confident I become that the idea of objective values simply doesn’t make sense, either in origin or implementation. I can’t think of any way that the origin of a moral system wouldn’t be subjective, since it’s always just based on somebody’s opinion (or their nature, or whatever). It is never and could never be “just the way it is.” As for implementation, I think that has to be subjective too, because there’s just no way to boil it down to hard numbers and concrete data like a soccer ranking. Even if you use as concise a moral framework as “avoid unnecessary harm,” there’s still plenty of subjectivity in judging what is harmful, what is necessary, and even what is avoidable. Everything about morality is subjective, there's no way for it not to be; I can’t see any way around that.