Heaving Dead Cats

Yesterday I wrote a post called the Burden of Proof Lies With The Claimant in which I talked about the burden of proof and who is responsible for it, namely the person making the claim or complaint. I talked about how theists believe in a god, so it's up to them to prove that god exists, since it's an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence, none of which has ever been forthcoming.

The first comment I got on the post was from a man named Brian. When I got up this morning  and read his comment I was inspired to reply. After a few minutes I realized my response was quite lengthy and decided a follow-up post was in order. After his comment you'll find my thoughts.  So here is his comment in its entirety:

There are a string of points here, but let’s just just address one of them which is the position of unbelief.

You see the world though a pair of glasses of unbelief. Everything is skewed and interpreted from that framework.

My guess is that your belief that God does not exist is so strong that you would not change that under any circumstances.

If God turned the sea into blood, swiped the stars from the sky, turned the moon blood red and blocked out the light of the sun (which is exactly what He WILL do) there will be millions of people that STILL refuse to believe what the Bible says.

They’ll try to find “scientific” reasons for the supernatural occurances and put off believing indefinitely while they try to figure it out. Why? Because they don’t believe.

God has already performed supernatural signs and wonders which were beheld by numerous eye-witnesses and recorded in the Bible…but that’s not good enough for the non-believers. They FIND reasons to write that off.

They frame people that lives 2000-4000 years ago as primitive, superstitious idiots who were one step away from being cavemen and their accounts of anything cannot be trusted.

However, along these lines of thinking, in 2000 years from NOW the people that will be living will consider US to be idiots that were one step away from being cavemen!

So even if God decided to bend to your “demand’ of Him for a series of supernatural signs and you had a change of heart and wrote down and enshrined forever your eye-witness experience…your words would be just those of a dead nutter who obviously was clinging to her religion.

This would necessitate a CONSTANT and CONTINUAL “requirement” that God continually reveal Himself in supernatural ways to each and every generation.

But why stop there? Why not require God to come down and have a one-on-one with each and every person? After all, he is omnipresent and all-powerful. Why not it to Him that he should have to have a face-to-face with everyone on their 13th birthday and tell them that yes, indeed, the Bible is His Word, take them on a 1-minute tour of heaven to experience the glory and then drop them for a 1 minute tour of Hell so they could experience the pain, then let them make their decision from there.

The essential problem with the burden of proof argument you have going is that people don’t WANT to believe…no amount of evidence could satisfy.

Extraordinary signs and wonders would be reasoned away, as would a personal interview with God Himself.

Thanks for your comment, Brian. I disagree with you. I do not see the world through glasses of unbelief. I believe in a lot of things, like E=mc², gravity, and all kinds of good things. I see the world as it is, rationally and sensibly. That's the difference. I don't have any glasses on. Nothing is skewing my vision. Good analogy though. That's how religious people see the world, skewed through coke bottle thick glasses of faith, stamped to their heads by religious leaders who seek to control them through fear and hope of reward after they die.

I don't have a belief that there is no god. You are skewing what I wrote based on your own flawed system. There is no god to believe in or not believe in. And your guess is totally wrong as well.

Let's take just little ol' me. I'm an atheist and a skeptic. I embrace the scientific method which means that I am rather open to just about anything, as long as it's unbiased, provable, verifiable, and reproducible. I am also comfortable with the idea that we have so much more to learn about the natural world. We know tons more than we did even a hundred years ago, And we have a bright future ahead of us, as well.

So let's say oh, I dunno, I'm cooking dinner, and your god decides it's time to pay a visit and let me know he is real. He magically appears in my kitchen and says, "Hi Neece, I'm GOD and I just wanted to pop in and let you know I exist." You say that even if god did that, I wouldn't believe in him.

In some ways you're right and in others you're wrong. At first, I would certainly want to examine my mental health. Your god would understand this, as there are people in the world who have hallucinations of all sorts and think that god or the devil is talking to them, when in fact they have a brain disorder or mental illness.

Then, yes, god would have to perform some miracles for me. Why? Because that would help me prove he's a god. They'd have to be pretty darn convincing, and he'd have to do them for my friends as well as a panel of scientists, to prove that other people can experience him and he's not just my crazy imagination. The results would have to be proven using the scientific method, and god would totally understand it and be willing to do it.

During this time of testing, I'd also ask him a bunch of questions to which I'd expect good solid answers. My first one would probably be, "why me? why now? and why have you waited so long to let us know you exist?" Your god would have perfect answers to these questions and be quite happy to answer them all.

If god did all those things and science proved he exists, I'd be willing to accept that your god is the real deal, because the evidence would warrant it.

If god took the route you claim where he would just obliterate the stars in a violent swipe of his mighty hand (why does god even need a hand, I wonder), if he turned the sea to blood, and turned the moon blood red, plus all the other armaggedon nonsense, and it happened all at once, I think after a bunch of panicking and general mayhem, scientists would search for answers as fast as possible to such sudden chaos. That's what scientists do. Scientists don't just fall on the ground and believe in fairy tales simply because they are scared and don't understand something. They investigate, they ask tough questions, they look for objective answers.

If god took the armageddon route, he'd be a total asshole, by the way, in my humble opinion. Why? Because there has never been a miracle in the life of anyone living. Why come on so hot and heavy all of a sudden with the nastiness?

On a side note, Brian, if you were taking a shower one day and suddenly the water got colder and a wind blew up in the bathroom and you saw, but didn't quite see, an invisible pink unicorn standing there in all her glory, and she talked to you saying, "Hi, Brian, how are you today? Oh, look, you dropped the soap. I don't have thumbs so I won't pick it up for you. Anyhoo, I just wanted to let you know I am the one true god and your god is a ridiculous myth. Would you instantly believe? Would you fall on your knees in your shower and worship the Unicorn in all her invisible pink glory?

Unicorns are mentioned in the bible, so maybe you'd be more apt to fall down in worship without hesitation, but personally, I'd still like verification that I hadn't just popped a blood vessel in my brain and wasn't suffering from delusions and hallucinations.

You say the god of the bible did supernatural signs and wonders for people back in biblical times. First, only the old testament ever talks about Abraham's god actually interacting with people and performing supernatural feats. The new testament was written later, and god didn't interact with anyone anymore. Only jesus did miracles and spoke vaguely of his father, and the father. Which would lead me to ask, why is there not one single corroborating text or reference, outside of the bible, to this jesus fellow? The Romans were meticulous record keepers. It lends credence to the idea that he never existed. In fact the 4 gospels were written 40-80 years after the supposed death of jesus, which again, was never documented in any other text. Very telling, if you ask me.

I would concur that people living 2000 or more years ago were pretty damned primitive. They would have thought the earth was flat, and if you read your bible, you'll find that they had a lot of strange ideas of how things happened in the natural world. That's ok, they didn't understand what they were seeing and experiencing. They created miracles and magic to explain whatever they didn't understand. Taken in that light, the bible can be used as a tool for historians to see how people lived and thought way back then.

But to give credence to those people as having knowledge greater than the collective knowledge of today is downright silly. Why did god only talk to people in the middle east? He created the whole world. Why would he only focus on the Fertile Crescent? What about all the Chinese, Indians, and the rest of Africa and wherever else humans had wandered to by then? Why only try to save the Fertile Crescent folks with his son? Why not have several sons and/or daughters for each area that would save China, India, etc? It makes no sense. You've lost your ability to think and reason, if you ever were allowed to have it in the first place.

In 2000 years, people will look back (if we haven't killed ourselves off in some stupid way by then) on us here at the turn of the 21st century as backwards and rather dumb. Imagine what they'll look back on the Iron and Bronze age middle eastern folks and think.

The thing is, a lot of people today try to build on all that has been learned before us. We try to understand history, science, math, the natural world, the world we are making today, all of it, in context and objectively as it evolves and grows.

Then there are huge numbers of people who cling to some ancient past, namely the middle eastern view from the time of Abraham, Jesus or Mohammed. For some reason their god stopped developing back then, and they are stuck in one book. Each group has their own book that is the be-all end-all text by which they must live. Full of Bronze and Iron age violence, hatred, morals and politics. That is completely crazy, if you ask me. I think in 2000 years the ancient god of Mesopotamia, in any of his three forms, will hopefully have died away and become another silly myth that will be studied and marveled at by students, historians and scientists. People who believed in that will be thought of as completely crazy, and the future folks will wonder why rational people would let those crazy people hold public offices, dictate policies in politics and government, and even have been allowed to have children they poisoned with such mindless fairy tales.

I am not demanding that your god do anything to prove himself to me. I'm simply saying, if a god exists, there is zero evidence of that anywhere. So if that god wanted me, personally, to suddenly believe in him or her, that god would understand why I would request proof. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The Invisible Pink Unicorn or your god or the Flying Spaghetti Monster have yet to show themselves to anyone or provide any evidence in the real world, here and now.

Personally I agree with you. If your god did prove to me that he exists and I fell on my knees and worshiped and enshrined him (which I don't think any real god would be interested in. How utterly vain and human is that?) I would really be amazed if 2000 years from now, if that same god never did anything again, that people in the future would just automatically believe my accounts. I would be just a dead nutter clinging to my religion.

Then again, I am under the impression from what your comment that you believe in the half articulate drivel of dead nutters from 2000+ years ago one hundred percent. So much so that you and a lot of your fellow christians deny a lot of what we've learned of this wonderful planet and the life encompassing it since then. That's completely bonkers, in my opinion.

If a god exists, and he or she wants to have people believe in him or her, and requires devotion, worship and sacrifices, all of which are base human emotions of a megalomaniac tyrant, then such a god needs to be active in the world, needs to be available and evident to most people. If a god is omnipotent and omnipresent, then it would be no big deal to do that. Why can't he or she be more active? Because there is no god.

So onto your idea of god coming down (so you believe heaven is above you in the clouds? Where exactly is that? Why haven't we seen heaven when we fly planes up there above the clouds? Why hasn't the space shuttle seen it? That's right, because it's a figment of the imaginations of long dead nutters) and talking to us one-on-one. I especially like the idea of god giving us a nice 13th birthday audience and tour of heaven and hell. That's actually quite clever and funny. That would be a great idea for god.

Of course, my first concern is for the children who die of cancer at age 4 or something similar. They never get to know god? That's pretty lousy of god to let that happen, if you ask me.

This god of yours is pretty terrible at his job. Personally I think he is a crummy god. He's screwed up from the beginning and for the last 2000 years, he's totally lost interest in his toys creations. Even if he did exist I seriously can't imagine worshiping him.

You're so wrong. You don't understand what it's like to think for yourself, to be rational. I know a lot of atheists. The atheists I know that are skeptics would most likely happily embrace the supernatural if it was proven to exist. I wouldn't go so far as to say we'd all worship your god if he finally showed up and took some personal responsibility and let us prove his existence. In fact, like I said earlier, I think I'd want to hang out with your god, have discussions and argue with him, but I wouldn't worship him.

Sure it would be nice to believe in fancy cool stuff like gods, aliens, fairies, pink unicorns, leprechauns, hobbits and the like. If they existed I'd believe in them. Just like I believe in gravity, rainbows as a natural phenomenon, the sun, the earth rotating around it, the stars, and on and on.

Logic is not a bad thing. Any real god would understand and embrace free thinking individuals. What god would be interested in fawning, obsequious, mindless, automatons that blindly worship, and just as blindly hate other humans who worship a different face of the same god? How boring, how human. A god that would demand  such from his or her creations is simply the figment of the imagination of a mindless, frightened people, unable to think, reason or live without a bigger than life father figure towering over them, completely unavailable, yet still telling them what to do and how to live and how to think. Atheists do not need that invisible, nonexistent father figure to live and prosper.