Friday, April 13, 2012

Atheist Propaganda Machine and List of atheist organizations around the world

Photobucket
the Man from C.A.R.R.I.E.R

Central Atheist Research and Rhetoric
Institute for the Eradication of Religion.

Atheists are always harping about how they don't have a movement, its just the absence of a belief, they are all different. They will spend days and weeks vehemently declaring that there is no organization and not movement and they are all different, they have no agenda, no ideology. They have such an effective propaganda machine that they have pulled off a highly effective snow job in spreading this garbage. Of course it's all a huge lie. Of course now they are going to play the conspiracy buff card. If I think they are pulling the wool over our eye then I must think they are Thrush on the Man form UNCLE. They all have secret meetings under shopping centers and they are in contract with Aliens and tea party people. What I'm saying doesn't have to be even slightly in that direction to be real and obvious and a proble. We all know what a political machine is.

We don't have to be saying that they have a secret conspiracy to say that they have a political machine. When we see how far flung and fictive their organizing is, when understand how their brain washing works to socialize adherents over the internet we can see there is obvious problem. What's even more obvious when we look at the atheist movement in all its organized ferocity it becomes very plain that they are lying when they say there's no movement, nor organization and that it's not an ideology. I'm demonstrated the ideology. I've shown the psychological motive. I'm demonstrated that it's moving in like with the FBI profile of a hate group. There's a continuum from a mild organization aimed at getting people interested to an extreme fringe of hate group mentality. Not all all atheists are in the hate group end of it. The hate group end is not a plot it's not connected to the valid organizations but it's there and it's growing. When we see the obvious nature of a political machine then it should be clear the line about not being organized is bunk. Therefore, when we see them all thinking the same way and saying the same thing sit should be clear there's an ideology.

When we observe their success and we see the organizations working toward their goals it's pretty organized theya re organized. How could they not be organized and this this plethora of success and groups behind the success:

  • Won the first federal lawsuit challenging direct funding by the government of a faith-based agency
  • Overturned a state Good Friday holiday
  • Won a lawsuit barring direct taxpayer subsidy of religious schools
  • Removed Ten Commandments monuments from public lands
  • Ended bible instruction in public schools after 51 year practice
  • Halted prayer at public institutions
  • Stopped direct subsidy to religious schools
  • Ended commencement prayers at a Top Ten University after 122 years of practice
  • Ended distribution of Gideon bibles in public schools.
  • Brought nearly 30 First Amendment lawsuits since 1977, and keeps several Establishment law challenges in the courts at all times.
<http://www.ffrf.org/legal> (18 Feb. 2007).
Approach Used to Spread Agenda
  • Files lawsuits!
  • Publishes Freethought Today
  • Sponsors annual high school and college atheist based essay competitions with cash awards
  • Conducts, annual national conventions, honoring the "Freethinker of the Year" for state/church activism, a "Freethought Heroine" and student activists
  • Bestows "The Emperor Has No Clothes" Award to public figures for their criticism of religion
  • Promotes freedom from religion with educational products, bumperstickers, music CDs, winter solstice greeting cards and literature
  • Publishes useful atheist books
  • Provides speakers for events and debates
  • Established a freethought book collection at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Library as well as a 2,000-volume office collection

OTHER SUCCESSES

Who has time to work on this? All of these struggle take big money and big legal talent. These are not things pulled off by a diverse group who share nothing more than the lack of a belief. This is clearly a vast political organization it has to be.

Phony Scholarship Machine

They also have a propaganda net work that cranks out phony scholarship. Let's look at the work of Richard Carrier long time Secular Web member and history student. Carrier appears to be an academic who just shares an interest in certain issues and just happens to be an atheist. When we dig more deeply into some of the organizations he's involved with it looks like more to it than that.

Richard Carrier has a couple of articles on his blog about a big conference for the Jesus Project
held at Amherst last December. O it sounds very scholarly. It presents the image of a group of major scholars meeting to mull over the lattes scientific findings that proving that Jesus never existed. This creates the idea that there is a climiate of opinion in the acadmeic world to expose the lies about Jesus as fiction and show that he never existed. But if you follow the trail to see where his lie originated, and the trail is clearly marked, one can see clearly that there's nothing scholarly about it. It's nothing more than a put up job, but it's no accident that the Jesus Myth stupidity though expossed time after time as bancrupt lives on and continues to draw in a group suckers who are hood winked into believing that they are on the cutting edge of scientific search for truth.

The tail begins with the first major clue, the website of an organization called "The Jesus Project." Carrier links to this site on his blog: http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2008/12/jesus-project.html. The site preports to be focual point for cutting edge academic research which suppossedly takes up where the Jesus Seminar left off:




The Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 by the late Robert Funk of the University of Montana, was famous for all the wrong reasons—its voting method (marbles), the grandstanding of some of its members, the public style of its meetings, even its openly defiant stance against the claims of miracles in the Gospels—including the resurrection of Jesus. Except for the marbles, none of this was new. The use of additional sources, such as Gnostic and apocryphal gospels, to create a fuller picture of the Jesus-tradition and the focus on context as though it provided content were at least innovative. But the Jesus who emerged from these scholarly travails was so diminished that—as I wrote in a FREE INQUIRY article in 1993—he could not exist apart from his makers: “The Jesus of the [Jesus Seminar] is a talking doll with a questionable repertoire of thirty-one sayings. Pull a string and he blesses the poor.”

What the Seminar had tacitly acknowledged without acknowledging the corollary is that over 80 percent of “Jesus” had been fictionalized by the Gospel writers. That is to say that, if we are to judge a man’s life by his sayings, the greater portion of the literary artifacts known as the Gospels is fictional. If we are to judge by actions, then what actions survived historical criticism? Not the virgin birth, or the Transfiguration, or the healing of the sick, or the purely magical feats such as Cana, or the multiplication of loaves and fishes. The Resurrection had quietly been sent to the attic by theologians in the nineteenth century. The deeds—except, perhaps, the attack on the Temple (Mark 11:15–19)—had preceded the words to the dustbin years before, yet scholars insisted the historical figure was untouched. Only faith could explain this invulnerability to harm....
...

Of course buying into this assumes that the Jesus seminar did it's work well, which almost no scholars outside of the Jesus seminar agree with. The Jesus Porject, of course, aims to do better. They are off to a smashing start wtih the selection of a highly original name. But find some telling things in the recounting of their mission:
....On a pleasant day in January 2007, at the University of California, Davis, the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER) asked the question that had been looking for a serious answer for over a hundred years: Did Jesus exist? The CSER fellows, invited guests, present and former members of the Jesus Seminar, and a wide variety of interested and engaged attendees applauded roundly after three days of lectures and discussions on the subject—appropriately—“Scripture and Skepticism.” The Jesus Project, as CSER has named the new effort, is the first methodologically agnostic approach to the question of Jesus’ historical existence. But we are not neutral, let alone willfully ambiguous, about the objectives of the project itself. We believe in assessing the quality of the evidence available for looking at this question before seeing what the evidence has to tell us. We do not believe the task is to produce a “plausible” portrait of Jesus prior to considering the motives and goals of the Gospel writers in telling his story. We think the history and culture of the times provide many significant clues about the character of figures similar to Jesus. We believe the mixing of theological motives and historical inquiry is impermissible. We regard previous attempts to rule the question out of court as vestiges of a time when the Church controlled the boundaries of permissible inquiry into its sacred books. More directly, we regard the question of the historical Jesus as a testable hypothesis, and we are committed to no prior conclusions about the outcome of our inquiry. This is a statement of our principles, and we intend to stick to them.


This sounds like a fair and scholary statment. But consider the words in blue. What that really says is "we support the Jesus myth theory." What tells me that, aside from everything coming out of their work that is (see Carrier's blog linked above). That they aim not to understand the Gospel writers as thoguh that would be some kind fo big error. Secondly, the line about "figures similar to Jesus," in other words, they are going to try to argue that they prove the dying/rising savior God bit. Mixing theology and history is inexcusable, but of course doing history as a cover for destruction of a religious belief they despize is fine and dandy. They are not biased they just have the answers before they ask the questions.

All of this is trivial, I'm getting to the point...
At the end of its lease, the Jesus Project will publish its findings. Those findings will not be construed as sensational or alarming; like all good history, the project is aiming at a probable reconstruction of the events that explain the beginning of Christianity—a man named Jesus from the province of Galilee whose life served as the basis for the beginning of a movement, or a sequence of events that led to the Jesus story being propagated throughout the Mediterranean. We find both conclusions worthy of contemplation, but as we live in the real world—of real causes and outcomes—only one can be true. Our aim, like Pilate’s (John 18:38), is to find the truth.


Who wants to bet his house against my assumption they they will find that Jesus didn't exist and that the Bible is totally wrong? Anyone willing to bet his house on that? Of course to be what they call "probable" they would have to conclude that the bible is a lie and Jesus never existed, because they are totally to religion and ideas connected with religion. One hint that this may be the case is who is publishing the results of the seminar:
In general the conference revealed some cutting edge stuff in the works. Later this year or the next, Prometheus Books will publish the conference papers (or rather, improved and lengthened versions of them, e.g. my chapter in that book will be rather different from my actual talk, which was largely off-the-cuff, but most of the content will be the same)
Prometheus books only does atheist books.




But none of this is the point. That just sets up a clear look at their true motives. They are not the least bit interested in scholarship. But what's really interesting is what it says at the top of the page on "introduction:" Jesus Project, "a product of Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion"So now Jesus Project is a project of this Committee. Who are these committee people? what is this organization? Trying to answer that question led me to another website:CSER "center for Inquiry"

Here's what they say about themselves:
The Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER) is a research division of the Center for Inquiry. Since its 1983 founding in Washington, DC, the Committee has worked to encourage humanistic, critical and non-parochial approaches to the study of religious traditions and institutions and to develop programs that promote the public understanding of religion in an international context.
CSER is an international research and educational consultation comprised of members (appointed fellows) who are nominated by an executive board. The current chair of CSER is Dr. R. Joseph Hoffmann, who succeeded Dr. Gerald Larue in January 2004.
The Jesus Project i not the world of scholars who organized their project as a group of truth seeking academics doing scholarly research, they were recruited by an organiztion whose praimry purpose and goal is to destroy christianity. Their statement above says they just to contribute to understanding of religion. But to understand it in what way? We already see they are not satisfied with the 2000 years of scholarship on Jesus becasue they consider that dominated by the chruch. Does that mean their "schoalrship" will be free and unecumbared? yet they recruted as the special as the special project of this organization, does that seem real open and fair. Let's look further and see who else is inoloved in this group.



The Head quarters of the group is in Amherst where the conference was held. So the conference is not related to the university, just held in the town. The same town where the organization that sponsors the project is.

P.O. Box 741
Amherst, NY 14226

This is under the tab on the website marked "advocacy." A group that does advocacy is not a scholarly group. They are not interested in truth, they are interested in selling their idea of the way things are, they want to dominate thinking. This is why they put up a big web of deception to create an imporession of impartical scholarship and truth seeking when in reality what they have is a put up job the purpsoe of which is to destory bellief. How do I know this, because look at the other wings of their organization. First of all this is their mission:


The Center for Inquiry is an active agent for social and cultural change in the courts, in the U.S. capital, at the United Nations, and at the grassroots level. Its advocacy work centers on three broad areas.

Fringe science and extraordinary claims

Through its Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and other initiatives, CFI advocates responsible, evidence-based treatment of extraordinary claims and fringe science, such as psychic phenomena, intelligent design creationism, and conspiracy theories. Council for Media Integrity presses for fair representation of naturalistic outlook in mass media.
In other words they are out to destroy faith and the concept of miracles. That means they are not going to allow scholars in the Jesus project who have any sort of religious belief. Its' going to be totally duobting, atheistic unbelieving and out to disprove any notion that gives religion even a slight benifit of the facts. Another wing of their group is dealing mental and medical health. Now does that include findings that religious belief is mental illness?

Medical and mental health

In age of alternative and complimentary medicine and New Age therapies, CFI advocates evidence-based medicine and mental health through its Commission for Scientific Medicine and Mental Health Practice (CSMMH), publisher of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine and the Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice, as well as in Skeptical Inquirer and its “Healthy Skeptic” online column.




Do New Agers typically push mental health alternatives? We know form the past that KGB played with the idea of mental health. Dissenters in the USSR were seen as mentally ill. Will these people allow alternative views of medicine and mental health? Are they trying to frame administrative medical people as mentally ill?

The organization is totally committed to a world without religion and a world in which religion is no longer vital force of any kind:


Religion, ethics and society

CFI is a leader in the struggle for a more rational, secular world. CFI’s Council for Secular Humanism (CSH) and Free Inquiry magazine promotes secular perspectives on contemporary issues; African Americans for Humanism assists humanist groups in America and Africa; the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion stimulates critical scholarship; and the Institute of the Secularization of Islamic Society stands up for the right to apostacy and blasphemy and the separation of mosque and state.
They are so concerned about the right to blaspheme, do they give a damn about the vast majority of humanity that thinks they are nuts and believes in God? This is just a nother look gorup of tin pot dictators who are convienced they they are special and they need to lead the ignorant masses, like Stalin, Like Hitler, like Pol Pot. One example of their work is this:

Amicus Brief Submitted in Americans United for Separation of Church and State v. Prison Fellowship Ministries (U. S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit)
Question Presented: Whether a state-funded program that seeks to rehabilitate inmates through religious conversion violates the Establishment Clause and whether the organization that operates the program can be required to return to the state the funds that it has received.



So even though the most remarkable success in American history for prision rehab has been religious conversion (Quaker ran jails of the nineteenth century) they want to disallow it because it's somehow violating them even though they are not in prsion and it does not effect them. But they can't stand the idea that others are being saved and led to God. Now would they force a voluntary program to shut? Are people beign forced into prision ministry? I don't think so.


Here's therir example of safe guarding religious liberty:


Safeguarding Religious Liberty in Charitable Choice and Faith-Based Initiatives

The Obama administration recently announced an expansion of government funding for so-called "faith-based initiatives," in which taxpayer dollars are doled out to sectarian religious organizations for the performance of social service programs. This government funding raises legal and constitutional concerns that the administration has yet to address directly. In February, the Center for Inquiry produced a position paper that called for an end to government funding of faith-based programs. Because government funding is scheduled to continue, the Center for Inquiry further recommended the adoption and vigorous enforcement of specific minimum safeguards to protect church-state separation and religious liberty.
CFI performed a detailed historical study of federal funding for faith-based programs, extending from the rise of "charitable choice" legislation during the Clinton administration through the explosion of taxpayer funding for religious programs under George W. Bush's Faith Based and Community Initiative. The position paper that resulted from this study expresses deep misgivings about government funding of sectarian religious programs. CFI cited concerns that these programs may use taxpayer dollars to support or favor religious activities and beliefs; that government may give preference to particular religious organizations in doling out funds; and that under current standards, recipients of taxpayer funding for faith-based programs are allowed to engage in employment discrimination on the basis of religion.
CFI's position paper recommends that government funding of faith-based programs be eliminated entirely. CFI's paper endorses a limited exception for truly secular social services programs, such as Catholic Charities, that have some affiliation with a religious institution but are provided by independent 501(c)(3) charities. CFI maintains that such charities must conduct social service programs without religious content or materials and without engaging in religious discrimination. (Catholic Charities is a non-profit corporation separate and distinct from the Catholic Church.)


Their example of safeguarding religious liberty is to close it down because it's somehow hurting them that religious groups are allowed to help people.

O but let's back up and look at the frienge scinece bit. The organization that put up the Jesus Porject also sponsers Skeptical Inquirer magazine, as their special mission of "advocacy." It's clear what they are advocating is the destruction of Christianity. This means the secular web and all the major force of internet atheists are just their little army of brown shirts running around persecuting Christians.

Its' the crystal night.
I'm sure I'm being alarmist. I'm just building a conspiracy theory out of think air. Do you really foresee the Jesus project not coming out with findings about Jesus not existing and the Bible being untrue? They will hood wink people into thinking that this is a scholarly mission and that it's fair and honest scholarship when the results are pre determined because it's professional wrestling. This is the work of real scholarship like Firts Von Erich was really an athelete and not an entertainier.


Look at it honestly, the Jesus Project is sponsorded the same organization that runs the Skeptical Inquirer magazine



Atheist Organizations Around the world.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_secularist_organizations

O it's not a movement. It's just a bunch of people who don't believe in God and who happen to start several hundred organizations around the world.

International

Atheist Alliance International[4]
The Brights' Net is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to "building a constituency" and "constructively address[ing] the marginalized situation of persons who have a naturalistic worldview."[5]
European Humanist Federation is a union of "numerous humanist organisations from most European countries" whose purpose is to promote humanism and secularism in Europe.[6]
International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) is "the sole world umbrella organisation embracing Humanist, atheist, rationalist, secularist, skeptic, laique, [sic][7] ethical cultural, freethought and similar organisations world-wide." IHEU is a union of over 100 Humanist or secularist organizations in more than 40 countries. It is an international NGO (Non-governmental organization) with special consultative status with the United Nations.[8]
International League of Humanists
International League of non-religious and atheists
Living Without Faith is an unincorporated association of atheists, agnostics and freethinking secular humanists. The LWF online community consists primarily of former religious adherents who provide moral support to fledgling freethinkers that live within religious-based communities.
Rationalist International

[edit] Australia

Atheist Foundation of Australia
Council of Australian Humanist Societies
Rationalist Society of Australia
The Secular Party of Australia

[edit] Brazil

Sociedade da Terra Redonda
Secular Humanist League of Brazil
Associação Brasileira de Ateus e Agnósticos (ATEA)

[edit] Canada

Humanist Association of Canada
Halton Peel Humanist Community
Humanist Fellowship of Montreal
Association Humaniste du Québec (AHQ)
Mouvement laïque québécois
Secular Connexion Séculaire (SCS)
Society of Ontario Freethinkers
Toronto Secular Alliance
Fondation Humaniste du Québec (FHQ)
Centre for Inquiry Canada
Humanist Association of Ottawa
Freethought Association of Canada
Canadian Secular Alliance

[edit] Croatia

Protagora - Croatian irreligious association[9]

[edit] Germany

Central Council of Ex-Muslims
German Freethinkers League
Giordano Bruno Foundation (Giordano Bruno Stiftung)
International League of non-religious and atheists

[edit] Iceland

Sidmennt

[edit] India

Indian Rationalist Association
Atheist Center
Bihar Buddhiwadi Samaj (Bihar Rationalist Society)
Dakshina Kannada Rationalist Association
Federation of Indian Rationalist Associations
Hyderabad Rationalist Forum
Indian Humanist Union
Kerala Yukthivadi Sangham
People's Science Center
Rationalist and Humanist Forum of India
Science and Rationalists' Association of India

[edit] Indonesia

Indonesian Atheists

[edit] Iran

Iran Secular

[edit] Ireland

Atheist Ireland
Humanist Association of Ireland
Humani

[edit] Italy

Italian Union of Rationalist Atheists and Agnostics (UAAR)

[edit] Kuwait

Youth Association of Kuwait (yakuwait)

[edit] New Zealand

Humanist Society of New Zealand
New Zealand Association of Rationalists and Humanists

[edit] Norway

Human-Etisk Forbund HEF has over 78,000 members,[10] making it "the largest group [in Norway] outside the State Church."[11]
Norwegian Heathen Society

[edit] Philippines

Philippine Atheists and Agnostics Society (PATAS)
Filipino Freethinkers

[edit] Serbia

Ateisti Srbije

[edit] Singapore

Humanist Society (Singapore) - [12]
Singaporean Atheists
Drinking Skeptically

[edit] Sweden

Swedish Humanist Association

[edit] Turkey

Atatürk Thought Association

[edit] United Kingdom

British Humanist Association
Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association
Humanist Society of Scotland
Leicester Secular Society, founded in 1851, bills itself as the "oldest secular society in the world."[13]
National Secular Society
North East Humanists
Rationalist Association
South Place Ethical Society, founded in 1793, identifies itself as "the oldest freethought community in the world."[14]

[edit] United States
Freedom From Religion Foundation billboard

American Atheists
American Humanist Association, according to its website, is the "first and largest organization promoting Humanism in the US."[15]
American Secular Union
The Atheist Agenda
Atheist Community of Austin (TX) is a nonprofit educational corporation to develop and support the atheist community, promote secular viewpoints, encourage positive atheist culture, to defend the first amendment principle of state-church separation, and fight anti-atheist discrimination. It broadcasts and streams online The Atheist Experience, a weekly general-interest atheist television program[16] and the Non Prophets online radio/podcast biweekly.
Atheists for Humanity, a 501 c(3) charity non-profit dedicated to raising money for secular charities and the destigmatization of atheists and atheism."[17]
Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, "The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty" represents multiple Baptist groups (but not the Southern Baptist Convention) in supporting religious liberty and the separation of church and state.
Camp Quest, "The Secular Summer Camp", is the first residential summer camp in the United States for the children of those who hold a naturalistic world view.[18]
Center for Inquiry CFI is dedicated to promoting and defending science, reason, and free inquiry in all aspects of human interest.
City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism
Council for Secular Humanism is a non-profit educational association and, according to its website, "North America's leading organization for non-religious people." The Council aims to "meet the needs of people who find meaning and value in life without looking to a god." CSH publishes Free Inquiry.
Fellowship of Freethought "To create a positive impact on our shared world, our mission is to provide a community that values and promotes a freethinking life unencumbered by the biases of tradition, dogma, and authority and that encourages people to live a reason and evidence-based life characterized by close fellowship, ethical contemplation, critical thinking, community service, and the appreciation of scientific knowledge and understanding of the universe and our place in it."[19]
Fellowship of Humanity
First Humanist Society of New York
Freedom From Religion Foundation, according to its website, is the "largest group of atheists and agnostics in North America." The Foundation represents the interests of freethinkers, with an emphasis on gender equality and reproductive rights, and the separation of church and state. It publishes Freethought Today, "the only freethought newspaper in North America."
Hispanic American Freethinkers
The Humanist Institute
Institute for Humanist Studies
Internet Infidels is a "a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to defending and promoting a naturalistic worldview on the Internet."
Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers
North Texas Church of Freethought
Rational Response Squad
The Reason Project
Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
The San Diego New Atheists and Agnostics is the largest and most active secular organization in San Diego, Ca."[20]
Secular Coalition for America
Secular Student Alliance
United Coalition of Reason
National Atheist Party
Practice What You Preach Foundation is a "non-profit organization that builds bridges between faith communities and secular organizations in the Greater Los Angeles Area."

[edit] See also

Lists of secularists: Agnostics, Atheists, Humanists, Nontheists

[edit] References

^ "Secularism". Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition. Oxford University Press, 1989.
^ The Secular Coalition for America, which has been identified by Brights.net as representing the interests of "secularist organizations", describes its constituency as "nontheistic Americans", including those who go by the labels "atheist, humanist, freethinker, agnostic, skeptic, bright, ignostic, materialist, and naturalist, among others." Who does the Secular Coalition for America represent? at the Secular Coalition for America website (Accessed 5 April 2008)
^ Some less common secularist labels include: apatheist, godless (in the non-pejorative, literal sense), ignostic, infidel (or unbeliever), heathen, materialist, or realist.
^ Atheist Alliance International website, 2008 (Accessed 9 April 2008)
^ The Movement, The Brights' Network, 2008 (Accessed 9 April 2008)
^ Presentation, European Humanist Federation website, 2006 (Accessed 10 April 2008)
^ Laïque (French): "secular"
^ About IHEU, IHEU website (Accessed 5 April 2008)
^ Croatian irreligious association Protagora
^ The Norwegian Humanist Association, Human-Etisk Forbund website (English version), 2011 (Accessed 5 February 2011)
^ Membership, Human-Etisk Forbund website (English version), 2004 (Accessed 9 April 2008)
^ Humanist Society (Singapore)
^ Leicester Secular Society website (Accessed 5 April 2008)
^ South Place Ethical Society website (Accessed 5 April 2008)
^ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about the American Humanist Association, American Humanist Association website, 2005 (Accessed 8 April 2005)
^ Atheist Community of Austin website, 2009 (Accessed 16 August 2009)
^ [1]
^ "Camp Quest is the first residential summer camp in the history of the United States for the children of Atheists, Freethinkers, Humanists, Brights, or whatever other terms might be applied to those who hold to a naturalistic, not supernatural world view." Camp Quest website (Accessed 5 April 2008)
^ http://fellowshipoffreethought.org/
^ Find Us, SDNA, 2010

O it's not a movement. It's just a bunch of people who don't believe in God and who happen to start several hundred organizations around the world.
Posted by at 5 comments:
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Why Do atheits srpead hate? (by Tercon--hailarious responses form atheits)

This is an hilarious exchange. this Tercon guy I had never seen before. He holds his own but the really funny thing is the ridiculous responses by atheists.

Published on CARM by >

Everyone who uses these arguments is guilty of this same thing, spreading the same hate that Communists did and do. You throw out these words of hate unto the internet; do you at all stop for a minute a think about what your words mean, where they originated from and where they lead when played out? Do you realize that when you propagate these arguments of hate, this hate is there forever on someone’s computer somewhere? They become your legacy hate to the world. Do you really want to be known and remembered for using the same hate that the Communists used to orchestrate the murder of millions of people? I see thousands of people who live in democratic countries spreading this hate. Communism does not need to set up regimes of their own making anymore; this system of hate is alive and well in the west and it is called atheism.


Liberation Sarah: "The first person to count the number of fallacies gets a prize."

Infinite Hope


Quote Originally Posted by Tercon View Post
]Why do Atheists spread hate?


Strawman, Ad hominem, Begging the Question.


Marxists / Communists / Atheists writings have remained consistent throughout the history of communism
IH: red herring, Ad hominem, posioning the well.
Meta: that is not a red herring. It is an amusing pun, talk of communism is red herring, get it?
, and atheism in the western democracies. From Marx’s time to the present, Atheists everywhere have vehemently denied the existence of God.


IH says:
Specal pleeding. (athests do not "deny" we do not BELIVE in Gods)
Meta:this is not special pleading. this guy doesn't have the slightest idea what special pleading is.


This becomes especially obvious when one considers the theological stance of the former U.S.S.R. The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, published in Moscow in 1950, called on the Communist Party to oppose religion and “to fight for the ‘full victory’ of atheism.” The Young Communist League’s list of Ten Commandments contains the declaration “If you are not a convinced atheist, you cannot be a good Communist.


IH:
Confusing association with causation, False Continuum, No True Scotsman
Meta: go shut em down "Hopie" hey I got some more improper terms you can throw at him, call it black is white slide! This guy is just dishing out he can think to call it weather it fits or not.

. . . Atheism is indissolubly bound to Communism.” In 1955, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev said, “Communism has not changed its attitude of opposition to religion. We are doing everything we can to eliminate the bewitching power of the opium of religion.”
Meta: here's where he really goes wild


Hopie syas:
No True Scotsman, Specal pleeding, Strawman, Ad hominem, Begging the Question, Red Harring.


Meta: why not the kitchen sink too man?

Tercon wisely responds

Stop being so foolish, of course you think you see all of these fake fallacies in what I wrote, you think you are a atheist, but it is not any real fallacy that you are picking up on when you read the OP, but just the conflict that you find now in yourself because something disparaging has been brought to your attention regarding something you think you can believe, a contradiction is in play.

And I can prove it; point out one thing that is not true in the OP.

The goal is truth, not things that are impossible to be true, even as hard as you might try to believe them they still show themselves to be untrue in the end. You have shown or proved nothing here with this post, it is meaningless; the truth trumps fabricated one-sided fallacies every time; you are doing nothing more than trying to project your fallacious beliefs unto me and anyone foolish enough to buy your foul spew, these lies plague you, not me. And hopefully not any of the Readers either.
the link Tercon uses:

Space Monkey who is legitimately one of the brighest people on the baord says:

Atheists are not responsible for the misuse of legitimate atheistic arguments to support actions that those arguments alone do not in fact support.

One needs further premises to move from "there probably isn't any god" to "genocide is a good thing to do".
Meta: monkey man how many times have seen atheists blame of Christianity for the stupidity of a few televangelists and a few fundies on message boards?
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Thursday, April 12, 2012

Atheist Brain washing and Socialization

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When I stated that atheist ideology was brain washing an atheist asked "when was I taken in a back room and worked over with a rubber hose while having bright lights shined in my face?" This is a crude understanding of a crude concept "brain washing." There's really no such thing, one of my sociology professors way back in undergrad school identified it as a socialization process. We can see that socialization process working all the time on any message board where atheists congregate. It consist mocking and ridicule against anyone who disagrees with their view. Hasn't it occurred to anyone to ask why atheists do all this mocking and ridicule? I chalked up to their fragile self esteem and their need to feel big by making other small. I think that's part of it it but it's only half the story.

The other half is that mocking an ridicule serve the function of destabilizing the personality and making the target vulnerable to socialization. I've pointed this out before as well. The Encyclopedia of sociology has some instructive things to say on this score.


Encyclopedia of Sociology Volume 1,

Macmillan Publishing Company, New York
 By Richard J. Ofshe, Ph.D.

Coercive persuasion and thought reform are alternate names for programs of social influence capable of producing substantial behavior and attitude change through the use of coercive tactics, persuasion, and/or interpersonal and group-based influence manipulations (Schein 1961; Lifton 1961). Such programs have also been labeled "brainwashing" (Hunter 1951), a term more often used in the media than in scientific literature. However identified, these programs are distinguishable from other elaborate attempts to influence behavior and attitudes, to socialize, and to accomplish social control. Their distinguishing features are their totalistic qualities (Lifton 1961), the types of influence procedures they employ, and the organization of these procedures into three distinctive subphases of the overall process (Schein 1961; Ofshe and Singer 1986). The key factors that distinguish coercive persuasion from other training and socialization schemes are:

  1. The reliance on intense interpersonal and psychological attack to destabilize an individual's sense of self to promote compliance

  2. The use of an organized peer group

  3. Applying interpersonal pressure to promote conformity

  4. The manipulation of the totality of the person's social environment to stabilize behavior once modified

Thought-reform programs have been employed in attempts to control and indoctrinate individuals, societal groups (e.g., intellectuals), and even entire populations. Systems intended to accomplish these goals can vary considerably in their construction. Even the first systems studied under the label "thought reform" ranged from those in which confinement and physical assault were employed (Schein 1956; Lifton 1954; Lifton 1961 pp. 19-85) to applications that were carried out under nonconfined conditions, in which nonphysical coercion substituted for assault (Lifton 1961, pp. 242-273; Schein 1961, pp. 290-298). The individuals to whom these influence programs were applied were in some cases unwilling subjects (prisoner populations) and in other cases volunteers who sought to participate in what they believed might be a career-beneficial, educational experience (Lifton 1981, p. 248).


We see these same aspects at work among atheists on message boards. Intense interpersonal attack to destabilize sense of self, that's the mocking and ridiculing. That's the use that's made of it, it's brain washing. Organized peer group, of cousre the atheists band together and form a united front, they never break ranks. Interpersonal pressure to promote conformity.

Statements supportive of the proffered ideology that indicate adaptive attitude change during the period of the target's involvement in the reform environment and immediately following separation should not be taken as mere playacting in reaction to necessity. Targets tend to become genuinely involved in the interaction. The reform experience focuses on genuine vulnerabilities as the method for undermining self-concept: manipulating genuine feelings of guilt about past conduct; inducing the target to make public denunciations of his or her prior life as being unworthy; and carrying this forward through interaction with peers for whom the target develops strong bonds. Involvement developed in these ways prevents the target from maintaining both psychological distance or emotional independence from the experience. (Ibid)

I've seen this on boards many times. Someone who seems like a normal Christian will be mocked and ridicule. Suddenly they start consider the atheist might have a good point, next thing you know they way they are an atheist. This is always followed by a denunciation of of their former belief system and big confessions about how narrow minded they were and how wrong and bad they were to be Christians.

They create a sense of dependency upon the group, threaten the stragglers with ridicule if they say unacceptable things, and destabilize others weak targets to so they can take them over. First the destroy self esteem then promise new self esteem based upon self acceptance. When one announces that he's come over, o man do they make a big deal. Out comes the welcome wagon they all start patting him on the back. I remember a girl on CARM a few years ago. She seems fairly strong as a Christian and at least convinced. She began voices a few doubts. They began calling her names telling her how stupid she is. always saying little snide things to indicate "your are not good enough." She kept growing in doubts. Finally she announced he was an atheist and they began saying "I knew you were intelligent all along." The same little pigs who told her how stupid she was began making over her Einstein-like mind.

When you see atheists just sort of idling just saying one banal stupid thing after another all oriented around mocking Chrsitians and mocking beliefs, that's the brain washing in progress. Its' a socialization process that offers the lonely outcast a social support net work as long as they illustrate that they can spout the ideology. When they are repeating the slogans of atheism they are showing that they belong in the group. When others join them they are recognizing their membership.
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Monday, April 9, 2012

Consciosuness is more than epiphenomena

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We have made great strides in the last two decades, understanding the relation between consciousness and brain chemistry. As a consequence of their reductionistic materialist mentality, atheists assume that any relation between brain and mind sums up all relation between brain and mind. Atheists tend to side with the reductrionionsts, assuming that all consciousness is mere epiphenomena related to brain function. Thus, they quick to argue that RE is nothing more than some sort of miss-fire of the synapse, or a heritable trait of evolution produced by the need of the tribe for unity. This view point is totally disproved, however, by none other than Andrew Newberg, one of the major researches of the “God Pod” (my own term for what is commonly called “the God part of the brain.” Researchers have discovered that there are parts of the brain that reaction to God-Talk. “The God part of the brain” as well as “God Pod” are both misnomers because there are actually several areas that react in this way. Newberg demonstrates that the existence of a “God pod” is not proof that RE can be reduced to brain chemistry, rather, not only is it the only way sentient flesh and blood beings could think or communicate, but it is also prettygood indication that there is more to reality that just atoms in the void. Newberg himself is believer in some form of “Buddhist like” theory about reality; he does not try to present a full-blown God argument. What he does present in clear indication that the matter cannot be easily reduced to nothing more than brain chemistry. Newberg actually does make the argument that what he has discovered could well bolster belief in some notion of the undifferentiated unity of which the mystics speak.1 What Newberg claims to have proven is that religious experience is real. It is not merely a trick of the mind, but something that really happens in the brain and can be studied and understood:

A skeptic might suggest that a biological origin to al spiritual longings and experiences, including the universal human yearning to connect with something divine, could be explained as a delusion caused by the chemical misfiring of a bundle of nerve cells. But …After years of scientific study, and careful consideration of the a neurological process that has evolved to allow us humans to transcend material existence and acknowledge and connect with a deeper, more spiritual part of ourselves perceived of as an absolute, universal reality that connects us to all that is.2

Newberg and his colleague Eugene D’Aquili3 have been at this research for many years. They use a SPECT camera, which stands for single photon emission computed topography. They trace a radioactive dye through the blood stream. The dye collects in brain cells, and they know that these are the cells most in use at the time because that’s where the blood is going. They find unusual activity in the posterior superior parietal lobe (PSPL) of those meditating. This area keeps track of up from down, helps judge angels and distances, and enables us to negotiate landscape. In order to perform these functions the PSPL must keep strict tabs upon the distinction between what is “me” and what is “not-me.” How could it negotiate landscape if it could not distinguish us from the things around us? For this reason Newberg and D’Aquili rename the area the OAA (Orientation association area). The two researchers find that this area (OAA or PSPL), which never rests, is strangely inactive while the meditation is in progress. After examining the descriptions “mystics” and those meditating game them, they concluded that the area was working, but it wasn’t getting any data. That would explain the sense mystics make of their experiences when they describe feeling an undifferentiated unity of all things. While skeptics might read this and think “ah ha! There’s the trick of the mind that makes it seem there is some spiritual reality,” Newberg sees much more to the issue than that. 3 Praying Franciscan nuns had similar findings, but their experience was describes as “closeness to God” rather than undifferentiated unity. Newberg argues that the research proves that these experiences are not merely tricks of the mind, wishful thinking or some form of “psychology,” but are instead “observable neurological events…mystical experience is biologically, observably, and scientifically real.”4

Skeptics are quick to argue that the RE is clearly the product of brain chemistry, and results from the PSPL malfunctioning, thus it is clearly an accident or epiphenomenal, after all, all of consciousness itself is epiphenomenal. This is a misbegotten assumption that Newberg disproves. While skeptics try to ground the origin of religion in this “misfiring,” their argument is merely begging the question. Newberg points out that the use of brain chemistry is really the only way God could communicate with sentient flesh and blood creatures. Our consciousness is transmitted through brain chemistry; this is the way we work. The argument is like saying the function of rabbit ears for television (or a digital converter box) is a mechanism, which makes the instrument function; therefore, it is the rabbit ears or converter box that produces the programming. This is my analogy not Newberg’s. But he does say:

…Tracing spiritual experience to neurological behavior does not disprove its realness. If God does exist, for example, and if He appeared to you in some incarnation, you would have no way of experiencing His presence, except as part of a neurologically generated rendition of reality. You would need auditory processing to hear his voice, visual processing to see His face, and cognitive processing to make sense of his message. Even if he spoke to you mystically, without words, you would need cognitive functions to comprehend his meaning, and input form the brain’s emotional centers to fill you with rapture and awe. Neurology makes it clear: there is no other way for God to get into your head except through the brain’s neural pathways. Correspondingly, God cannot exist as a concept or as reality anyplace else but in your mind. In this sense, both spiritual experiences and experiences of a more ordinary material nature are made real to the mind in the very same way—through the processing powers of the brain and the cognitive functions of the mind. Whatever the ultimate nature of spiritual experience might be—weather it is in fact an actual perception of spiritual reality—or merely an interpretation of sheer neurological function—all that is meaningful in human spirituality happens in the mind. In other words, the mind is mystical by default.5

Newberg is not saying that there can’t be a God, nor is he saying that we understand all reality and can rule out the spiritual. He is saying that all we know of reality is mediated; what we take to be the unvarnished world is just a rendition of the unvarnished and that’s all it can be. Where I take issue with him is in his assertion that even mystical experience itself is mediated. In my view the actual experience at the mystical level is direct experience of the divine. But any attempt to understand it or put it into words is mediated by our brain’s rendition of the world. Thus the only way we ever can empirically comprehend the real, is through the mystical; to discuss it we must use analogical language and cast our experience into the realm of metaphor. Trusting to metaphor to interpret the world would probably make many atheists nervous, since they seem to be afraid of the subjective. But this is the nature of the case for all knowledge. We are separated from the things in themselves by our understanding and perceptions of the world.

Atheists tend to scoff at religious experience anyway because they dichotomize between perceptions gained through scientific means, and perceptions “off the cuff.” The latter are to be scoffed at and rejected as “subjective,” the former are to be sought as somehow guaranteed to be valid; even though they are still filtered through the “construct” created by the brain. The reaction of naturalistic thinkers to all manner of phenomenological apprehension has been to write it off as the subjective (thus untrustworthy) residue of outmoded misconceptions. One such misconception, swept aside in one gesture since the ninetieth century, is the concept of the spiritual. Naturalists tend to write off consciousness as a whole; content to allow their reductionism to saw off anything they can’t study through their methods. On the internet the average atheist makes the assertion that brain creates mind, this is evident since any sort of brain injury changes the nature of mind, thus mind is just a trick of the light, and brain is all there is. Thus experience is a side effect of the autonomic and other systems brains are really about. Newberg demonstrates the foolishness of this view. He does not speak of “holism” but what he says about the brain/mind dichotomy would fit in with that viewpoint. Yes, brain creates mind, but that does not mean that mind reduces to brain. The two are inseparable but they are no more the same thing than are hardware and software. He uses the analogy of waves. We can no more separate brain from mind than we can separate wave from the energy that produces it. Without the energy the wave would lie flat, without the energy the wave would have no expression.6 In my own view spirit = mind, mind = consciousness. The soul is symbolic of the overall life of the individual in relation to God. In other words, “soul” is a symbolic term, it is something we are, and not something we have. “He is a lost soul,” “seventeen souls were lost that day,” that, and other such phrases demonstrate what I mean. I make the case that the Bible more often than not employs the phrase in the way. The soul is a way of speaking about the over all direction of a person’s life in relation to it’s final destiny in God. It is not a little ghost in the machine. I do not blame atheists for their assertion that such notions are outmoded and unscientific, they are. We need to maintain the notion of a Casper the friendly ghost inside us that lives on after we are gone. We need not think of spirit as some special sustenance that is just too special for science to discover. These are outmoded concepts; they are unnecessary even to maintain a concept of life after death.

We do not know what consciousness is per se, science has not come close to pinning it down. Nevertheless, most science rules out the ghost in the machine as a philosophical fallacy. I agree with them. Mind is spirit, and if there is spiritual force or power or substance in this life could as easily been the force of God’s mind (or whatever might be analogous to “mind” for God) as to be a special discreet substance. Spirit, or mind, is created by the brain, that it is not reducible to the brain nor does it mean it has nothing more than epiphenomenal status. Just because the two are inseparable, assuming of course physical existence, does not mean they two the same thing. Just as the wave and the energy that makes the wave are inseparable but they are not the same thing. What of life after death? If we have to think of life after death as the survival of an independent agent that can move around under its own power then one can hardly see how consciousness could survive apart from brain. But if we think of it as not a “place” where one lives, but a larger framework of consciousness which one joins, “God himself” then it might be more intelligible. It is beyond the scope of this essay to speculate about the nature of heaven. The only point I wish to make here, and not to belabor, is that accepting a neurological basis for spirituality need to eliminate or “disprove” anything generic to the Christian faith. No biblical passage says that the spirit is a Casper the friendly ghost type agent floating around out of the body. In no way does this mean that I have abandoned the idea of spirit. We are spiritual beings, but the spirit is consciousness, the mind. I accept the idea that consciousness is a basic property of nature, because it is irreducible. Thus consciousness in humans may be the result of brain chemistry, but it is not identical or reducible to brain chemistry and nothing more. It is the intangible dimension that Newberg proves is necessary for one to understand reality or think. Perhaps it is complexity that produces consciousness. If consciousness is a basic property of nature, than when a certain level of complexity is achieved consciousness is born. Maybe there are different levels of consciousness. Thus rocks have their own little rocky consciousness that doesn’t do much by our estimation. Trees have a bit more consciousness but still can write a poem or go to the moon, and then we have a high level of consciousness but still not divine. This is not the venue for this discussion. I only mention these as hypothetical possibilities. For the sake of my experience arguments I will assume that consciousness emerges at a certain level of complexity just as heat results at a certain degree of friction.
What is this intangible dimension that Newberg proves is necessary for one to understand reality? How does he prove this? By the nature of the way in which the brain understands the word, as seen in what he calls “brain Architecture.” By over viewing this structure of brain interaction with world, he shows that the naïve empiricist view of “objective” observation of the world is outmoded and inaccurate. Our raw observations of the world around are not “plain, unvarnished” “literal” views of the world.

The medieval German mystic Meister Echkart lived hundreds of years before the science of neurology was born. Yet it seems he had intuitively grasped one of the fundamental principles of the discipline: What we think of as reality is only a rendition of reality that is created by the brain. Our modern understanding of the brain’s perceptual powers hears him out. Nothing enters consciousness whole. There is no direct, objective experience of reality. All the things the mind perceives—all thoughts, feelings, hunches, memories, insights, desires, and revelations—have been assembled piece by piece by the processing powers of the brain from the swirl of neural blimps. The idea that our experiences of reality—all our experiences, for that matter—are only “secondhand” depictions of what may or may not be objectively real, raises some profound questions about the most basic truths of human existence and the neurological nature of spiritual experience. For example our experiment with Tibetan mediators and Franciscan nuns showed that the events they considered spiritual were, in fact, associated with observable neurological activity. In a reductionist sense this could support the argument that religious experience is only imagined neurologically, that God is physically ‘all in your mind.’ But a full understanding of the way in which the brain and the mind assemble and experience reality suggests a very different view.7

He then goes through a shopping list of brain function, demonstrating how the brain apprehends the world. He covers the autonomic system, with the arousal and quiescent systems; He discusses the relation of this system to spiritual experience, as the relation of the heart rate to meditation is crucial in many forms of meditation. He talks about autonomic states and spiritual experience. Hyper quiescence and hyper arousal are states of relaxation and excitation. These are results of both medication and worship experiences. He covers the limbic system that relates emotional states to higher thoughts and concepts. He calls the limbic system “the transmitter of God.”8 This is how we can put together associations of emotional involvement with theological concepts. These same functions are connected to animal survival and finding food. Newberg is not saying that this proves there’s nothing there to sense in religious experience, no more so than he is saying that there is really no food for animals to find in the forest. All of this is just describing the processes and apparatus by which God communes with us, it does not in any sense demonstrate a lack of veracity to the experiences. He talks about the hypothalamus as the “master controller” for the autonomic nervous system.9 He does discuss other parts of the brain, but major focus for our purpose is what he calls “cognitive operators.” This is how the mind understands the world, Newberg tells us. It is significant that the speaks of “mind” here and not “brain.” He’s clearly saying this higher-level understanding is put together out of the bits of information gathered through all the other sensory inputs.
Newberg uses a very apt analogy; he refers to a robot constructed in one of the first robotic experiments. The robot took a whole day to perform its task of moving across the room and opening a door. The second time it tried it could not do it at all. The reason it took so long was because every time it moved it had to re-photograph the entire room and then re analyze where it was in the room. The room kept changing, as it got closer to the door, so it had to re think itself in relation to everything every time it took a step. It couldn’t open the door at all the second time because the researchers put a big x on the door, and it had not been programmed to understand that doors could be marked with X, so it did not recognize the door. We are like that robot except in one crucial way; we apprehend the room through sensory mechanisms that allow us to distinguish ourselves from the room. The difference is, we do not have to rethink ever thing we know every we take a step, we are capable of extrapolation from our knowledge to the fact that doors could have X’s on them. He does not put it this way, but one could say, we are capable of making leaps of fall all the time. We can look beyond the X and see the dorr, we can make the assumption that doors can have X’s and be confident in it. It is these leaps of faith, metaphors for example that enable us to put information together and understand. Newberg does put in terms of metaphor and symbol. The empiricist might think our perceptions take literal photographs of what is there and thus the more literal our understanding the more accurate. Oddly enough, Newberg shows it is the opposite. Being literal, exacting, empirical, does not give us the truth of the world; being able to make metaphors, extrapolate, guess, and take leaps of faith gives us navigation skills in the world.

The brain is structured such that collective structures contain various functions that Newberg and D’Aquili call “cognitive operators,” which enable us to makes these “leaps of faith.” They speak of the holistic operator, which enables us to group component parts and comprehend a whole structure. The reductionist operator does the opposite; it allows us to see the whole broken down into component parts. “The abstractive operator, results for mt he operations of the parietal lobe in the brains left hemisphere,” allowing the formation of general concepts from individual facts. There’s a quantitative operator, a causal operator, Binary operator (enables dichotomized perception such as “me”/“not-me”), an existential operator, that actually allows us to judge the reality of events, this is why we can understand that jokes are pretend and hypothetical without having to be told so, and an emotional value operator, “exists to assign an emotional valence to all elements of perception and cognition.” In other words, this one allows us to put it all together and sort out. This is why we can hear a job, “a man in New York is ran over by a car every fifteen minutes, and boy is he getting tired of it,” without going “O that poor man! Why can’t they stop it?” All of these operations and functions come together to form man’s basic myth making ability. Through these functions we can interpret a feeling in such a way as to understand something of the divine. We are outfitted to know God. Where translate early myth making, which goes back as far as we can find traces of distant relatives, the Neanderthal (65,000 years) we find the evidence of concepts such as magic, afterlife, and spiritual forces. Certainly these qualities have always been present in modern human beings, as we know them. It would be easy for an atheist or skeptic to write off this argument as indicative of some ancient mistake whereby mankind conjured up a lot of nonsense to explain that which he could no explain by scientific means. This is the usual approach of atheists to understanding religion. Yet at this point Newberg plugs in a much more sophisticated understanding of mythology, via Joseph Campbell. As with afterlife as a means of coping with the harsh realties of death, mythology enables us to find meaning in the world, to extrapolate and thus transcend the literal harsh realities to a point where we feel at home in the universe, a universe of value and meaning. Myth shows us “what is most important, and what in terms of the inner life is more deeply and profoundly true. The power of myth lies beneath its literal interpretation in the ability of its universal symbols and themes to connect us with the most essential parts of ourselves in ways that logic and reason alone cannot.” The point is that this whole myth constructing function is not just some vestige that should be discarded in favor of machine like efferent mathematical abilities, or emotionless Vulcan logic, but that even ordinary sense perceptions require this extrapolation ability to allow us to function in the world. That means that the most atheistic and naturalistic view point of reductionism could not interpret the world for us without the myth making function or the little leaps of faith that allow us to see the door rather than the X. The situation with the “God pod” is a lot more complex than the original term “God part of the brain” implied (or more so than the term “God Pod” for that matter). It is not just one part of the brain; it’s not just that several centers somehow “register” God talk. It’s more that the overall nature of brain architecture is “designed” or at least function over all to use religious type thinking (metaphor, analogy, faith) even in ordinary navigation in the world.


Several writers have tired to show that religion can be accounted for naturalistically. Scott Atran (In Gods We Trust), Pascal Boyer (And Man Creates God) and David Sloan Wilson (Darwin's Cathedral), but the most famous among them is probably Daniel Dennett, in his work Breaking the Spell. Dennett doesn’t actually say point blank that the naturalistic nature of religion disproves it. He is sounding a call to study religion scientifically without giving it a special pass to protect people’s sacred cows. I have no problem with that, per se. The problem is that atheists have a tendency to tease out an innuendo that since religion can be accounted for through evolutionary processes, that does disprove any “supernatural origin” for it. The Things Newberg says about myth making, about the neurological basis of religion would be taken by many as a start indication that religion is just another evolutionary accident that wound up benefiting us. What he says about myth making giving us hope the face of the stark realities of death, especially when we consider the nature of the brain as it began to reflect upon itself and to create the mind; this furnishes a powerful argument. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it assumes that the basic reason for religion is to explain things. The atheist approach to understanding belief is empiricist. We want to prove an idea we believe in, so we look for indications in the universe that it’s true. We wish understand why water periodically falls form the sky, and every time it does the clouds come and get black. So we invent the only reason we can think of, big guy up in sky sends water down because he likes us. We can keep him happy by sacrificing sheep to him; he will keep raining on our crops. Of course this is too simplistic to even refute. Religion exists because people have a sense of the numinous. The atheist has to approach belief as primitive failed science. Newberg is telling us that this sense of the numinous is bound up with the very structure of our brains; we have to sense this and we have to make up myths to make sense of it. It is not an attempt to understand the physical workings of the world, although of course the early version of such attempts would draw upon religion, but it is actually an attempt to understand our place in the world, to make peace with death. Atheists tend to approach belief as empirically demonstrated by the contents of it. In other words, they look at the arguments from religious experience as justifying belief because the experience itself is a miracle. Its’ so amazing that anyone would sense God’s presence this must be the basis the argument, and the reason why it would be an argument at all is because it is something wildly amazing that can’t happen without miraculous intervention of the divine. That’s why a naturalistic explanation is so fatal to religious belief, or so they think. Matthew Alper writes The God Part of the Brain, and atheists react as though he’s saved them from eternal fate. E. O, Wilson shows us what they think his findings prove: “Alper uses a Socratic technique to brilliantly and flawlessly argue that our concepts of spirit and God are derived from the mechanics of our brain…enormously important…full of scientific and philosophical truths.” It’s so wonderful he bravely says what Newberg says. Except the atheists treat his work as though he is somehow answering Newberg. So again Wilson, as with Dennett, doesn’t actually say “this is disproves religion,” but the innuendo is there. Least anyone think it this is the natural inference; it simply stands to reason they are thinking in terms of beating a miracle argument.

But, the argument doesn't turn on being able to say, "This is a miracle that people have this experience because it couldn't happen unless God did this directly." That is not the argument. I will argue that there are unique aspects that couldn't happen without divine presence being involved. We must discuss what the supernatural is in order to answer this question. Supernatural is ontology, but it is also the power of God to vivify human nature and raise it to the higher level. These experiences do exactly what the supernatural is supposed to do. Since they are actually mystical experience itself, and that was the original conceit of the supernatural, they are literally the supernatural; no question about it. They are it.

That these experiences can be induced naturally is really not surprising nor does it undermine the argument. It would if the argument was a proof of God in an absolute sense, but since I claim only rational warrant this is a rational warrant for belief:

(1) the content is usually religious

(2) the effects draw people into belief

(3) it fits what we should expect of god

(4) no other aspect of life produces this effect, no other aspect has the data to back it up. When compared with other forms of support, even when smoking is controlled or religious smokers do better than non-religious. We only get these results from religious experience. This means there is validity to religion that justifies in considering these phenomena to be indicative of the co-determinate of God consciousness and thus, rationally warrant belief. If one is determined to construe such phenomena as signs of the veracity of religion it is not illogical to do so.

Natural and supernatural are juxtapositions; they are not antithesis of each other. They are two sides or facets of the same harmony. We should be willing to find supernatural in the natural, and that's just what Maslow says we find:
Now that may be taken as a frank admission of a naturalistic psychological origin, except that it involves a universal symbology which is not explicable through merely naturalistic means. How is it that all humans come to hold these same archetypical symbols? The "primitives" viewed and understood a sense of transformation, which gave them integration into the universe. This is crucial for human development. They sensed a power in the numinous, that is the origin of religion."

"In Appendix I and elsewhere in this essay, I have spoken of unitive perception, i.e., fusion of the B-realm with the D-realm, fusion of the eternal with the temporal, the sacred with the profane, etc. Someone has called this "the measureless gap between the poetic perception of reality and prosaic, unreal commonsense." Anyone who cannot perceive the sacred, the eternal, the symbolic, is simply blind to an aspect of reality, as I think I have amply demonstrated elsewhere (54), and in Appendix I,

The argument turns on the rational warrant for belief found in the believer’s sense of transformation, and in the prima facie nature of the warrant. That is why no amount of neurological data can reduce the divine to the mundane or dissect the transcendent. No amount of naturalistic ideology can empty heaven of its sacred nature. It is not that these experiences have to miracles and can’t be understood in other way but to resort to God as an explanation, but that if we take them to be indicative of God, we are rationally warranted to do because they do exactly what we expect the touch of God to do in our lives, and they do this in a way that can’t be reduced to naturalistic phenomena without losing the phenomena.

As we say in Chapter (X) the various studies indicate that RE results in long term positive effects. Nothing else produces these kinds of effects; at least, there is no data to indicate that anything does. We should expect God to renovate lives, we should expect integration points into meaning in life, and revitalized inner lives, as a result of contact with the divine. This is what we find in religious experience, we do not find it other areas, even in areas that logically it should exist. Take the example of social support groups. One would theorize that if religion is just a naturalistic development as a result of evolutionary forces (which it is, but it is more than that too) one would find that any sort of positive support group should give one the same health benefits as religious belief. Such is not the case. As shown, even when smoking is controlled for, the religious experiencing believer is better off than people of other groups. This is true even in comparing religious believers to humanistic care groups and ideologically harmonious political groups or any other kind of group. No other support group offers the kind of long-term positive effects, as does religious participation. This is true of either participation or experience. The difference in participating and experience is in that between church attendances vs. actually experiencing God’s presence. Even just going to church seems to have a positive effect upon health even when one never “feels” a thing. It’s not that this is a miracle that is not the argument. The argument is that this is what we should expect from contact with the divine, transformation. Thus the argument turns upon sign. It turns upon the satisfaction of a prima facie burden to produce some valid reason why we should believe. We should believe because experience of the divine pans out as it fits the criteria we should expect form the co-determinate.



Matthew Alper God Part of the Brain

body, only by mere coincidence, it always ends up on our face. Apparently, humans are genetically "hard-wired" to develop in a very specific and particular way.
For every physical characteristic that is universal to a species, there must exist some gene or set of genes responsible for the emergence of that particular trait. For example, the fact that all cats possess whiskers means that somewhere within a cat's chromosomes there must exist "whisker" genes. Of our own species, that all humans possess a nose in the middle of our face means that somewhere within our chromosomes there must exist "nose" genes that instruct our emerging bodies to develop one in that very place. It's not, for instance, as if a nose can develop anywhere on one's body, only by mere coincidence, it always ends up on our face. Apparently, humans are genetically "hard-wired" to develop in a very specific and particular way.




Essentially, what I'm suggesting is that humans are innately "hard-wired" to perceive a spiritual reality. We are "hard-wired" to believe in forces that transcend the limitations of this, our physical reality. Most controversial of all, if what I'm suggesting is true, it would imply that God is not necessarily something that exists "out there," beyond and independent of us, but rather as the product of an inherited perception, the manifestation of an evolutionary adaptation that exists within the human brain. And why would our species have evolved such a seemingly abstract trait? -In order to enable us to deal with our species' unique and otherwise debilitating awareness of death.



atheists might think this disproves religion but i think it proves it. It's what I've been saying about the religious instinct for years.



1 Andrew Newberg, Why God Won’t God Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief. (New York, Ballentine Books), 2001, pp. 157-172.
2 Ibid
3 Newberg gives a fine tribute to his late partner who was already gone by the time the book was published. P10
3 Ibid., pp 1-6.
4 Ibid., p7
5 Ibid., p37
6 Ibid. p33
7 Ibid. pp. 35-36
8 Ibid. pp. 36-43
9 Ibid.
he does not say where or who did the experiment. Pp. 11-14
Ibid, p 52
Ibid., p56
Publishers website The God Part of the Brain URL: http://godpart.com/ visited 5/23/08
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Thursday, April 5, 2012

Stupid atheist post of the day: "big thinker"

So called "big thinker" has a big stupid post in which he says the basic ignorant things that most atheist know to avoid. He thinks he's being brilliant.

Originally Posted by bigthinker View Post
Actually, that is exactly what YOU do, not me.
I don't need arguments because science deals with evidence, not what you THINK exists. Arguments deal with what one THINKS. Evidence, since it exists outside of the mind, is beyond the realm of argument.


that's ludicrously stupid. Science make arguemnt to defend hypothesis that you don't know underscores how little you know about science. Science doesn't prove things it can only disprove. read Popper. science does not give you a big fortress of facts because it can't prove your world view.

science is not opposed to God. there is no science that says "there can't be a God." so you are just turning scinece into something its not, ideology.


BT:
Yep. And science deals with evidence. And science is sufficient and is the correct tool for determining the existence and nature of things that exist outside the mind. Arguments deal with ideas and logic forms the guidelines for dealing with arguments.


arguments deal with evidence. Science is not sufficient to disprove the existence of God. that is true proof you don't know anything bout scinece. that's childish and demonstrates a total lack of understanding.

(1) God is outside of time, how are you going to get outside of time to see if he's there?

(2) God is beyond the basis of reality because the world we live in is a thought in his mind. how you are going to get outside your mind to check that you are not hallucinating and then outside the reality of the world to make sure its' not a thought in a mind?

you just can't do it. so you have to just guess based upon your biases which are not good.


BT:
Rather god can't compete with science because science actually does something; science produces actual results, God doesn't.

god doesn't have to compete with science because they have different domains. Science couldn't out explain God because it can't explain most things.

science can't solve the basic epistemological dilemmas that I mapped out.

BT
Science puts God in its proper context.



Wishing for it doesn't make it so. you have scinece totally out of it's proper context. science proper context is the physical world and nothing more. it reality, not nature not epistemology not metaphysics. science can't tell us squat about God.


BT
There is no evidence that God exists outside of the mind and there is only evidence that God exists within the mind.



I brought several pieces of evidences and you did not answer them. your statement is totally dishonest becasue you are hiding the fact that you have no answers.


BT
So even after I informed you about circular reasoning, you STILL don't know what that is? sheesh dude, you might consider some education!
After I showed that his arguments are circular he began saying mine are. I said his were because he would assert God is only a concept in the mind, the argue that he had proved God is only in the mind (he never actually made an argument but merely asserted it) therefore since God is only in the mind he had proved there's no God. His premise rests on his conclkusion, circuklar reasoning. He still hasn't given a reason why my arguments are circular.

you still don't know what that means because you didn't answer the question. you can't tell me the definition of circular

I showed that your reasoning is circular. YOU CAN'T EVEN TAKE THE CLUE AND LOOK AT WHAT i SAID TO KNOW THE DEFINITION!
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Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Great New Site: Atheism Analyzed

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It's new to me. It may not be new at all (the first copy I saw was dated December 2010). Atheism Analyzed doesn't tell us who authors the stie, but it does promise on the masthead "A former 40 year Atheist analyzes Atheism, without resorting to theism, deism, or fantasy."
***
Apparently it's written by an atheist who is tired of the ideology and group think of atheism. He let's it all out too. He's contradicting all the standard bromides and propaganda slgoans from "atheist is not organized" to "atheism has no ideology."

The self-appellated “Skeptics” who cluster into skeptical societies are in no way skeptical of any of the extrapolations of “neuroscience”; these non-skeptical skeptics are all devout believers in the dogma of Atheism / Naturalism / Philosophical Materialism. So, are we non-believers in those dogmas entitled to be skeptical of Neuroscience, as presented under these dogmas?
The first issue I saw was about the atheist propaganda of neuro science: "Neuroscience and dogmatic reductionism." Neuro scinece as use by atheists is not about study of the nervous system but about an ideolgoical use of reductionism to write out of human experience anything that doesn't turn humans into machines. This is not science it's propaganda, but the atheists all assume it religious and refuse to hear a word against it. They believe it is scinece and it masquerades as science becuase it's reductionsitic and they have tome associate reductionism with scinece. He quotes Raymond Tallis [1]:

If you come across a new discipline with the prefix “neuro” and it is not to do with the nervous system itself, switch on your bullshit detector. If it has society in its sights, reach for your gun. Bring on the neurosceptics.

What passes for neuroscience among atheist is tracking bloodflow in the brain. The reason they do this is to accoaiate a part of the Brain with neurological activity. One example is the so called "god part of the brain." Even though he's not an atheist this the assumption Andrew Newberg makes it's the way he works. As the author, the former 40 year atheist puts it:

This practice of tracking blood flow in the brain is used to declare that certain cerebral functions are located in certain areas of the brain. Then other things which are NOT known are inferred and extrapolated, and come be part of a false knowledge base, one that is perpetuated by worldviews that require such. Some of the false knowledge is based on the idea that the blood flow increase is the only activity in the brain that is involved in the processing of that particular input function, and another is that a certain area of the brain does only one function – that which is being investigated. Another is that all brains are materially the same, wired alike and ready for fully caused, predetermined responses based on their history of causation.

None of this is proven or even suggested by the blood flow in the brain under cognitive stimulation. Every stitch of the determinist conclusion is extrapolation beyond existing facts, extending toward dogmatic conclusions.
He quotes Tallis at length:

There is an article in the NewHumanist of the UK site by a neuroscientist, Raymond Tallis [1], who attacks this practice of iconifying neuroscience with false extrapolations into dogmatic philosophy.
”There is a huge gap between the community of minds and animal quasi-societies. The vast landscape that is the human world has been shaped by the activity of explicit individuals who do things deliberately. Uniquely, the denizens of that world entertain theories about their own nature and about the world; systematically inquire into the order of things and the patterns of causation and physical laws that seem to underpin that order; create cities, laws, institutions; frame their individual lives within a shared history that is recorded and debated over; narrate their individual and shared lives; and guide, justify and excuse their behaviour according to general and abstract principles. Neuro-evolutionary theorists try to ignore all this evidence of difference and have even requisitioned the pseudo-scientific notion of the meme, the unit of cultural transmission, analogous to the gene that ensures its own survival by passing from brain to brain, to capture human society for quasi-Darwinian thought. Just how desperate is this endeavour to conceal the Great Ditch separating humans from other animals is evident from the kind of items that are listed as memes: “the SALT agreement”, “styles of cathedral architecture”, “faith”, “tolerance for free speech” and so on.”

If we were not at a great distance from the kind of activity revealed in our brains and, indeed, from the kinds of aggregations seen in the natural world, then the voluntary adoption of social policies, influenced or not by the latest whizz-bang neuroscience, would be impossible; for there would be no outside from which policies could be dreamed up, judged and tested. Indeed, there would be no outside of the organic world. This is illustrated by the pseudo-science of neuro-law. Supposing, for example, we really could assimilate jurisprudence into brain science, on the grounds that it is our brains that make us criminals or law-abiding, then, since our brains are causally wired into the remainder of the material universe, we would have to look beyond the brain for the ultimate source of our actions. They are objects, not subjects. The plea “My brain made me do it” would essentially be that of “the Big Bang made me do it”.
There are attempts by the Atheist/Philosophical Materialist community to present free will as somehow bimodal, that all brain activity is fully caused by our genetics coupled with our environments on the one hand, yet that we still do obviously have the apparent capability of decision making even though it has to be an illusion. (Never mind that the illusion has created complex societies with complex accoutrements which do not seem to be illusions or delusions.)
This degenerates into an arguemnt any kind of free will, since if mind is physical and all phyical phenomena require cause and effect, and if cause and effect is determinism, then all mind is determined. This would mean that computers and all other products of human thought are illusions and human thought is an illusion and humans are automatons.

Atheist seem to be automatons. they passionately believe that God should have made them incapable of sinning. The author of the blog doesn't' go that far into the matter. yet the blog promises to be a vital resource.






[1]Tallis’ research was mainly in the area of geriatric and rehabilitative neurology. He is listed as an author, philosopher, and “polymath”, as well as a retired MD and researcher.
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