Underseer
Contributor
Getting back to the original topic, it's really hard for me to pick just one.
Faith as Epistemology
This is probably the biggest one for me. Faith is simply bad epistemology. Both the Bible and the dictionary define faith as accepting a conclusion with inadequate evidence, no evidence, or even contrary evidence. Every religion I know of insists that faith is a virtue. That alone should be enough to convince people that religion is wrong. Why would someone tell you that it is virtuous to accept conclusions without evidence unless they're trying to convince you of something that's fishy? But no, most theists simply accept that faith is a virtue to the point that I've argued with plenty of theists who honestly believe that conclusions arrived at without evidence are inherently superior to conclusions based on evidence.
Worst of all is the reason they like faith. They like faith because faith dispels doubt. Christians and Muslims in particular are quick to tell you that they like the certainty of faith, which is to say they like having fewer doubts.
That is completely alien to me.
Why would anyone want less doubt? Without doubt, how can we have questions? Without questions, how can we have meaning? Faith sounds cold, empty, and meaningless to me. I've never been religious and I simply cannot understand why someone would want less doubt. It's as if they want the satisfaction of having answers, but don't want to put in the effort to find out if any of their answers map to reality.
Any fool can give you answers as long as you don't care about the quality of the answers. What matters is not having answers, but having answers that are independently verifiable.
With evidence-based epistemologies, you at least have the potential of finding out when you're wrong about something. Granted, most of us kick and scream and pout and avoid admitting that we're wrong about something, but at least with evidence-based epistemologies we have a chance. Once faith tells you something is true, how can evidence convince you that you're wrong?
Those Christians in Africa who are setting children on fire for witchcraft are not bad people, nor are they bad Christians. They accepted a single bad conclusion based on faith: that witchcraft is real. Once you accept that one bad conclusion, it is not hard at all to imagine yourself doing what modern Evangelical Africans are doing, or what our European ancestors did. If witchcraft is real, it can harm you, and you will want to get rid of witches as fast as you can so that no one else gets hurt either. But if witchcraft isn't actually real, no matter what, the people you identify as witches aren't actually harming anyone. Once you accept that witchraft is real, you will inevitably misidentify people as being a threat. People who burned witches in the past and in the modern world genuinely believe that they are doing the right thing and making the world a better place.
Faith told them that witchcraft is real, so how can evidence ever convince them that it isn't? Faith forms a shield that makes it much more difficult to realize that they're wrong about the existence of witchcraft.
If you use an unreliable path to the truth, then you will do a bad job of figuring out what's true, which will lead you to make some bad decisions. Worse, you won't know that your bad decisions are bad because faith neatly makes doubt go away.
And that brings us to...
Authority-Based Morality
If you are using a bad epistemology, you're going to make some bad decisions without realizing it. If some of your decisions are bad, then some of your moral decisions are going to be bad as well. The witchcraft thing above is a perfect example, but by no means the only one. You can't convince Islamic extremists that what they are doing is wrong because faith told them that what they are doing is right. Those Christians who blow up clinics and shoot doctors can't be convinced that what they are doing is wrong because faith told them that what they are doing is right.
As if the faith thing doesn't have enough negative moral implications on its own, the morality-from-authority business makes things worse.
The
Euthyphro dilemma shows that you can't get morals from an external authority. You simply can't. How do you know that the authority and the commands of the authority are actually good? The only way you can know this is to develop a definition of morality that is independent of the authority, but once you do that, your definition is now the source of your morality, not the authority. An authority cannot give you morality, but can only demand your obedience. There simply is no substitute for sitting down and thinking things through.
This leads to a variety of absurdities, the most ridiculous of which is William Lane Craig's Divine Command Theory. This is the most absurd and extreme form of moral relativism imaginable. It's good if God does it, but not if you do the same thing. It's good if God commands it, but not if you command the same thing. Craig argues that objective morality proves the existence of God, but he can't actually prove that God is good without making a complete mockery of objective morality. In trying to resolve the various absurdities created by the whole morality-from-authority thing, he has been forced to argue that killing all the babies in a city is a good thing:
If you use a bad path to the truth, then you don't know which of your conclusions are true. Some of them could be true, all of them could be true, none of them could be true, and you would not know the difference. If you use a bad method of making moral decisions, then you could be a good person or you could be a monster, and you would not notice the difference.
Why encourage people to use a bad way of knowing right from wrong? For the most cynical of reasons, of course. As Dan Dennett says, religion is a trap baited with people's desire to be good. All religions claim to be the source of morality. Making moral choices is hard, and you'll inevitably get it wrong some of the time. Religion suckers people in with promises of making moral decisions easier. All you have to do is surrender your obedience, and you will become more moral. No more of that tedious thinking stuff, just follow this list of rules (much of which would have been barbaric even in the ancient civilizations that developed those rules). Again, I want to stress that there is no substitute for sitting down and thinking things through carefully. The sweet promise of easier moral decisions is all a smokescreen.
Once they sucker you in using your desire to be good, they use your desire to be good as a trap to keep you there. All religions claim to be the source of morality. They all insist that you will be more moral if you only obey their rules. Thus, they directly claim or imply that if you ever leave the religion, you will become a less moral person.
The really sick thing is that none of it is true. Becoming religious doesn't make you more moral. Theists are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes like murder and rape. Theists are more likely to be addicted to dangerous drugs. Theists are more likely to be unwed teen mothers. Theists are more likely to be repeat teen mothers. Theists are more likely to get divorced. Theists are more likely to get abortions (how's that for irony?). While some atheists use this data (and more) to argue that theists are morally inferior or that atheists are morally superior, I'm not sure I'm willing to go that far, but at the very least the data proves that theist claims of moral superiority are simply false. Theist claims that theism will improve your morality are demonstrably false. Theist claims that leaving religion will make you less moral are directly contradicted by the evidence.
Afterlife Threats
Threatening that you will become less moral if you leave the religion isn't enough, apparently. Every religion I know of makes some kind of threat about the next life if you fail to follow the teachings of the religion. In Hinduism and Buddhism, you could spend your next life in a lower caste, or even be reborn as an animal. In Judaism, you only get a next life if you obey all the teachings. The Nordic religion not only required you to believe certain things, but distinguish yourself in battle if you want to get the good afterlife. The worst, though are the threats believed by all Muslims and most Christians: eternal torment in lakes of fire.
This really perplexes me. The moment those threats are made, why don't people leave the religion right there and then? If someone has to use threats to get you to believe something, shouldn't that be an indication that what you are being asked to believe is a bunch of bunk?
Of course, this is precisely why more sophisticated Christian proselytizers carefully avoid the topic of Hell until after they've convinced someone to believe. The true purpose of the threat is not to get people to believe in the first place, but to keep them in the religion if they ever start having doubts. Many ex-Christians and ex-Muslims report that fear of Hell lingers long after they figure out that their former religion is false. The fears generated by these afterlife threats must be intense.
The Christian and Muslim threats are particularly appalling to me. An infinite punishment for a finite crime is infinitely unjust. No matter what the punishment is, no matter what the crime is, an infinite punishment for a finite crime is infinitely unjust. How can someone believe that a god is benevolent if it does something that is infinitely unjust? And the punishment isn't just infinite, it's horrific in magnitude.
If you have a child, think about your child and what you feel towards your child. If you don't have a child, try to imagine the things you would feel about that child. Got that in your mind? Good.
Now, what would your child have to do to deserve being tortured with fire for one day?
What would your child have to do to deserve being tortured with fire for three weeks?
What would your child have to do to deserve being tortured with fire for five months?
What would your child have to do to deserve being tortured with fire for ten years?
What would you think of a parent who tortured his children with fire for any reason for any length of time? Would you think they were a good parent? Would you think they were a loving parent? Or would you call the cops?* We are told that the "parent" who does this is not only benevolent, but omnibenevolent: the maximum possible good.
Worse still are the atrocities enabled by these supernatural threats.
These threats are so extreme, that if you believe in them, you could conceivably justify all kinds of atrocities, and many Christians and Muslims have done exactly that. If you can torture someone to death but save several others from eternal torment in fire by doing so, aren't your actions therefore justified? Isn't this why the Christians tortured countless thousands of Jews and Muslims to death during the Inquisition? Isn't this why otherwise rational human beings flew planes full of people into buildings full of people on September 11, 2001? Isn't this at least partially responsible for the incredible number of holy wars that have carved rivers of blood through the pages of our history books? Isn't this the reason Catholics and Protestants set so many human beings on fire for heresy, the crime of disagreeing with someone on a theological matter? Isn't this the reason for the similar Muslim practice of takfir (recently brought back into fashion by ISIS)?
While the more sophisticated proselytizers know not to mention Hell during apologetics debates, most Christians and Muslims are not sophisticated proselytizers. In the vast majority of apologetics debates I get into, the Christian or Muslim will invariably try to use threats of Hell to convince me their religion is true, and that gets to why this whole thing is so damn stupid. Surely every Christian and Muslim is aware that most other religions make afterlife threats. Surely they notice that none of those afterlife threats convinced them to convert to any of those other religions. Surely, and yet every other Christian or Muslim I talk to fully expects me to be convinced by the threats from their religion even though they know that the threats made by other religions did not convince them. When you confront them with this, they make the most ridiculous excuses, and then go right back to making threats. They insist that the threats are not why they believe what they believe, yet they fully expect their threats to convince other people.
Christianity and Islam may be the worst in terms of afterlife threats, but they are hardly alone. The peculiar afterlife threats made by the Nordic religion led to the Vikings brutalizing the rest of Europe for centuries.
* I'm pretty sure I lifted this argument from Sam Harris. My apologies if it was someone else.
Faith as Epistemology
This is probably the biggest one for me. Faith is simply bad epistemology. Both the Bible and the dictionary define faith as accepting a conclusion with inadequate evidence, no evidence, or even contrary evidence. Every religion I know of insists that faith is a virtue. That alone should be enough to convince people that religion is wrong. Why would someone tell you that it is virtuous to accept conclusions without evidence unless they're trying to convince you of something that's fishy? But no, most theists simply accept that faith is a virtue to the point that I've argued with plenty of theists who honestly believe that conclusions arrived at without evidence are inherently superior to conclusions based on evidence.
Worst of all is the reason they like faith. They like faith because faith dispels doubt. Christians and Muslims in particular are quick to tell you that they like the certainty of faith, which is to say they like having fewer doubts.
That is completely alien to me.
Why would anyone want less doubt? Without doubt, how can we have questions? Without questions, how can we have meaning? Faith sounds cold, empty, and meaningless to me. I've never been religious and I simply cannot understand why someone would want less doubt. It's as if they want the satisfaction of having answers, but don't want to put in the effort to find out if any of their answers map to reality.
Any fool can give you answers as long as you don't care about the quality of the answers. What matters is not having answers, but having answers that are independently verifiable.
With evidence-based epistemologies, you at least have the potential of finding out when you're wrong about something. Granted, most of us kick and scream and pout and avoid admitting that we're wrong about something, but at least with evidence-based epistemologies we have a chance. Once faith tells you something is true, how can evidence convince you that you're wrong?
Those Christians in Africa who are setting children on fire for witchcraft are not bad people, nor are they bad Christians. They accepted a single bad conclusion based on faith: that witchcraft is real. Once you accept that one bad conclusion, it is not hard at all to imagine yourself doing what modern Evangelical Africans are doing, or what our European ancestors did. If witchcraft is real, it can harm you, and you will want to get rid of witches as fast as you can so that no one else gets hurt either. But if witchcraft isn't actually real, no matter what, the people you identify as witches aren't actually harming anyone. Once you accept that witchraft is real, you will inevitably misidentify people as being a threat. People who burned witches in the past and in the modern world genuinely believe that they are doing the right thing and making the world a better place.
Faith told them that witchcraft is real, so how can evidence ever convince them that it isn't? Faith forms a shield that makes it much more difficult to realize that they're wrong about the existence of witchcraft.
If you use an unreliable path to the truth, then you will do a bad job of figuring out what's true, which will lead you to make some bad decisions. Worse, you won't know that your bad decisions are bad because faith neatly makes doubt go away.
And that brings us to...
Authority-Based Morality
If you are using a bad epistemology, you're going to make some bad decisions without realizing it. If some of your decisions are bad, then some of your moral decisions are going to be bad as well. The witchcraft thing above is a perfect example, but by no means the only one. You can't convince Islamic extremists that what they are doing is wrong because faith told them that what they are doing is right. Those Christians who blow up clinics and shoot doctors can't be convinced that what they are doing is wrong because faith told them that what they are doing is right.
As if the faith thing doesn't have enough negative moral implications on its own, the morality-from-authority business makes things worse.
The
Euthyphro dilemma shows that you can't get morals from an external authority. You simply can't. How do you know that the authority and the commands of the authority are actually good? The only way you can know this is to develop a definition of morality that is independent of the authority, but once you do that, your definition is now the source of your morality, not the authority. An authority cannot give you morality, but can only demand your obedience. There simply is no substitute for sitting down and thinking things through.This leads to a variety of absurdities, the most ridiculous of which is William Lane Craig's Divine Command Theory. This is the most absurd and extreme form of moral relativism imaginable. It's good if God does it, but not if you do the same thing. It's good if God commands it, but not if you command the same thing. Craig argues that objective morality proves the existence of God, but he can't actually prove that God is good without making a complete mockery of objective morality. In trying to resolve the various absurdities created by the whole morality-from-authority thing, he has been forced to argue that killing all the babies in a city is a good thing:
If you use a bad path to the truth, then you don't know which of your conclusions are true. Some of them could be true, all of them could be true, none of them could be true, and you would not know the difference. If you use a bad method of making moral decisions, then you could be a good person or you could be a monster, and you would not notice the difference.
Why encourage people to use a bad way of knowing right from wrong? For the most cynical of reasons, of course. As Dan Dennett says, religion is a trap baited with people's desire to be good. All religions claim to be the source of morality. Making moral choices is hard, and you'll inevitably get it wrong some of the time. Religion suckers people in with promises of making moral decisions easier. All you have to do is surrender your obedience, and you will become more moral. No more of that tedious thinking stuff, just follow this list of rules (much of which would have been barbaric even in the ancient civilizations that developed those rules). Again, I want to stress that there is no substitute for sitting down and thinking things through carefully. The sweet promise of easier moral decisions is all a smokescreen.
Once they sucker you in using your desire to be good, they use your desire to be good as a trap to keep you there. All religions claim to be the source of morality. They all insist that you will be more moral if you only obey their rules. Thus, they directly claim or imply that if you ever leave the religion, you will become a less moral person.
The really sick thing is that none of it is true. Becoming religious doesn't make you more moral. Theists are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes like murder and rape. Theists are more likely to be addicted to dangerous drugs. Theists are more likely to be unwed teen mothers. Theists are more likely to be repeat teen mothers. Theists are more likely to get divorced. Theists are more likely to get abortions (how's that for irony?). While some atheists use this data (and more) to argue that theists are morally inferior or that atheists are morally superior, I'm not sure I'm willing to go that far, but at the very least the data proves that theist claims of moral superiority are simply false. Theist claims that theism will improve your morality are demonstrably false. Theist claims that leaving religion will make you less moral are directly contradicted by the evidence.
Afterlife Threats
Threatening that you will become less moral if you leave the religion isn't enough, apparently. Every religion I know of makes some kind of threat about the next life if you fail to follow the teachings of the religion. In Hinduism and Buddhism, you could spend your next life in a lower caste, or even be reborn as an animal. In Judaism, you only get a next life if you obey all the teachings. The Nordic religion not only required you to believe certain things, but distinguish yourself in battle if you want to get the good afterlife. The worst, though are the threats believed by all Muslims and most Christians: eternal torment in lakes of fire.
This really perplexes me. The moment those threats are made, why don't people leave the religion right there and then? If someone has to use threats to get you to believe something, shouldn't that be an indication that what you are being asked to believe is a bunch of bunk?
Of course, this is precisely why more sophisticated Christian proselytizers carefully avoid the topic of Hell until after they've convinced someone to believe. The true purpose of the threat is not to get people to believe in the first place, but to keep them in the religion if they ever start having doubts. Many ex-Christians and ex-Muslims report that fear of Hell lingers long after they figure out that their former religion is false. The fears generated by these afterlife threats must be intense.
The Christian and Muslim threats are particularly appalling to me. An infinite punishment for a finite crime is infinitely unjust. No matter what the punishment is, no matter what the crime is, an infinite punishment for a finite crime is infinitely unjust. How can someone believe that a god is benevolent if it does something that is infinitely unjust? And the punishment isn't just infinite, it's horrific in magnitude.
If you have a child, think about your child and what you feel towards your child. If you don't have a child, try to imagine the things you would feel about that child. Got that in your mind? Good.
Now, what would your child have to do to deserve being tortured with fire for one day?
What would your child have to do to deserve being tortured with fire for three weeks?
What would your child have to do to deserve being tortured with fire for five months?
What would your child have to do to deserve being tortured with fire for ten years?
What would you think of a parent who tortured his children with fire for any reason for any length of time? Would you think they were a good parent? Would you think they were a loving parent? Or would you call the cops?* We are told that the "parent" who does this is not only benevolent, but omnibenevolent: the maximum possible good.
Worse still are the atrocities enabled by these supernatural threats.
These threats are so extreme, that if you believe in them, you could conceivably justify all kinds of atrocities, and many Christians and Muslims have done exactly that. If you can torture someone to death but save several others from eternal torment in fire by doing so, aren't your actions therefore justified? Isn't this why the Christians tortured countless thousands of Jews and Muslims to death during the Inquisition? Isn't this why otherwise rational human beings flew planes full of people into buildings full of people on September 11, 2001? Isn't this at least partially responsible for the incredible number of holy wars that have carved rivers of blood through the pages of our history books? Isn't this the reason Catholics and Protestants set so many human beings on fire for heresy, the crime of disagreeing with someone on a theological matter? Isn't this the reason for the similar Muslim practice of takfir (recently brought back into fashion by ISIS)?
While the more sophisticated proselytizers know not to mention Hell during apologetics debates, most Christians and Muslims are not sophisticated proselytizers. In the vast majority of apologetics debates I get into, the Christian or Muslim will invariably try to use threats of Hell to convince me their religion is true, and that gets to why this whole thing is so damn stupid. Surely every Christian and Muslim is aware that most other religions make afterlife threats. Surely they notice that none of those afterlife threats convinced them to convert to any of those other religions. Surely, and yet every other Christian or Muslim I talk to fully expects me to be convinced by the threats from their religion even though they know that the threats made by other religions did not convince them. When you confront them with this, they make the most ridiculous excuses, and then go right back to making threats. They insist that the threats are not why they believe what they believe, yet they fully expect their threats to convince other people.
Christianity and Islam may be the worst in terms of afterlife threats, but they are hardly alone. The peculiar afterlife threats made by the Nordic religion led to the Vikings brutalizing the rest of Europe for centuries.
* I'm pretty sure I lifted this argument from Sam Harris. My apologies if it was someone else.
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