An update on the question I posed to a bunch of atheist trolls at Religion Dispatches, what does atheism have that Christianity doesn't. The semi-pro atheist troll I first posed the question to came up with "self respect". Which is rather odd since she and her fellow atheists accused Christians of being puffed up with self-regard and snobbery about their religion having a special status and granting Christians a special status above all others*.
But, considering the wacky stuff atheists come up with to maintain their rigid, materialist monist insistence that the material universe "is all that is or was or ever will be" in the words of their fellow materialist, Carl Sagan, that claim that atheism promotes or even contains self respect is not only absurd, it's hilariously absurd.
I noted yesterday that those atheists in philosophy, in neuroscience, in other biological and psychological fields, when they come up against the problem of consciousness, have come to the ultimate intellectual decadence of denying that consciousness, itself, exists as anything other than being a mere epiphenomenon of the chemistry and physics that merely happen, as a result of random chance to be present in the skulls of people and animals, which results in what we are so deluded to believe we experience as is a living being - our very selves - thinking. In order to maintain their materialist-atheist ideology, these university based scribblers and babblers have impeached everything about human intellectual activity into having no more of a status of distinction or truth than that cast iron skillet you left in the sink getting rusty or the baking powder you used to raise your pancakes in it.
As also pointed out yesterday, those academic atheists, somehow, have no shame in demonstrating that they, themselves, don't really believe that because they not only copyright their scribblings about that, they would certainly find, somehow, that those selves they turn into a mere nothing, their very own selves have a right to the random reactions that are their thoughts and not only a right to them but any of their colleagues they might suspect of cribbing "their" "intellectual property" have done their non-existent, insignificant "selves" a moral wrong which "they" have a "right" to see punished. Really, considering what those always PhD'd philosophers and scientists claim, you'd have to put scare quotes around virtually every one of the nouns and many of the pronouns and adjectives dealing with issues such as plagiarism, copyright, really any discussion of morality or legal rights in order to signal you're aware that they and anyone who claims to believe their nonsense are engaged in a ridiculous level of doublespeak. They clearly have so little faith in their idea that they're entirely unwilling to live even their absurd academic lives as if they really believed it.
I have said before that my past eleven years as a critic of atheism got started when one of the old regulars at an atheist majority-lefty blog, during a discussion came out with the barroom atheist claim** that "Science has proved that free-will is a myth". Considering we were lefties railing against violations of peoples' freedom and dignity, reading a lefty make that claim forced me to consider how that belief would pretty much destroy the validity of our claims for freedom. I suspect I might have seen the problem before that but seeing a lefty claim that on a lefty blog without anyone else seeing the problem such a belief, believed with the alleged certainty that science has, science that such lefties worship in place of God, couldn't but lead to the invalidation of all of our political-moral claims. The belief that "science has proved free-will is a myth" I suddenly realized, is fatal to liberalism though it was perfectly compatible with dictatorship, oligarchy, plutocracy. feudalism, etc. It would certainly be compatible and convenient for pseudo-lefty Stalinists, Maoists, etc and how they could ignore those mountains of corpses and grinding oppression that those "lefty" heroes forced other people to live under.
That simple statement, made by a lefty on a lefty blog to no objection by the other resident lefties, was what started me on this. I stay in it for the same reason I started on it, that it is a totally false and unnecessary belief which is fatal to egalitarian democracy, and which puts any idea of civil rights, to any moral stand other than survival of the fittest, might makes right or to any claim of oppressed people or any claim of rights for other sentient life at a fatal disadvantage. Materialism undermines the entirety of liberalism. When it is pressed to its ultimate and rationally necessary meaning, it entirely undermines any status given to people and other living beings over inanimate objects, it demotes all of our insights into less than delusions. A delusion, after all, is had by a conscious being who is capable of becoming undeluded, to come to know the truth. Materialism has to produce a claim that the conscious beings, themselves, have no more status than a delusion and mirage and their mental products have no more status as being true than any other chemical reaction happening under whatever random physical conditions they happen in.
Like those Buddhists who cleave to the doctrine of no-self with a similar understanding, atheist materialists not only have no claim to producing self-respect, they must deny the existence of a self which would have to be deluded to believe it had respectability. Though, as seen in the academic atheists who make such claims, they don't have the self-respect to really conduct their lives and careers as if they really believe what they claim with such obvious pride.
As a traditional, convinced, American style liberal, I'm saying the whole thing is nonsense that no liberal could believe without fatal damage to their liberalism.
* This exchange, for example:
Jim Reed Anthony McCarthy • 19 hours ago
I see your point. Christianity was founded on judging others, not having others judge them.
Anthony McCarthy Jim Reed • 18 hours ago
Christianity was founded on judging your own actions. You might want to check out what Jesus said about taking the beam out of our own eyes before criticizing the spec in the eyes of other people, judging not lest we be judged, on those who are without sin throwing the first stone...
It doesn't, though, prevent me from pointing out that you a. don't know what you're talking about, b. are lying.
There was more. Anyone who's ever read atheists slamming Christians will know what I'm talking about.
** He was the kind of guy who would join the I.W.W. so he could show people his card and call himself a wobbly just like ol' Joe Hill and Big Bill Haywood. Oddly, they very seldom mention about the only Wobbly who ever really spent their life actually feeding hungry people, clothing them, sheltering them, etc. Dorothy Day. Only she did most of that as a Catholic Worker. She was an even better leftist after her conversion to Christianity as a Catholic.
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