The Logical Atheist

This morning I enjoyed watching Robert Mayhew's lecture "Ayn Rand's Intransigent Atheism," which was given at last summer's Objectivist Conference, or OCON. In this examination of the cosmological argument, he says much of what I've tried to say on this blog. Mayhew, a professor of philosophy at Seton Hall University, points out that Ayn Rand called herself an "intransigent" but not a "militant" atheist. Her objective was not, in a primary sense, to argue against or reject belief in God, but to affirm reason as the only method of obtaining knowledge about what exists. One who is fully committed to reason is necessarily an atheist because no room is left for what people mean by God . Her use of the word intransigence indicated that the claims of theism could simply be dismissed as empty nonsense because they misuse the language by ignoring basic metaphysical truths that cannot be escaped without self-contradiction. Rand's orientation i...

Moses, Mahomet, and Jesus, can lay as little claim to moral merit, or to the character of the benefactors of mankind, as any three men that ever lived upon the face of the earth. They were all of them impostors; two of them notorious murderers in practice, and the other a murderer in principle; and their existence united has, perhaps, cost the human race more blood, and produced more substantial misery, than all the other fanatics of the world.  --Elihu Palmer (1764-1806), Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery Among the Human Species

The sectarian divinity, which Christianity presents to us, is represented as a consuming fire, as a being possessing fiery indignation and an uncontrollable vengeance; as a being who disregards all just discrimination upon the subject of moral principle. He declares in some parts of the New Testament, that every thing shall be regulated by his arbitrary will without regard to the nature or character of the case. "He will have mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth." (See Rom. chap. ix. &c.) Is it possible that even a Christian believer can suppose, for a single moment, that the principles of genuine morality can rest upon such an arbitrary basis? No; a divinity of immoral description is the bane of moral virtue. The purest theism is independent of morality, and morality is independent of that; much less then can the corrupt and vitiated conceptions of barbarous ages be produced in support of a principle which could, not exist without the intellect...

If this be true [that nature is self-sufficient], in regard to the essential nature of theological ideas, how much more powerfully will it hold upon every sectarian modification of the subject. If pure theism be independent of morality, and morality independent of that, because it rests upon the relations and the properties of human life, then it will be easy to conceive that the subordinate descriptions of sectarian theology must be still more unconnected with the present subject. The character, however, of all the gods of antiquity, is, of itself, a sufficient consideration to exclude them from any participation in the concerns of an exalted virtue. The Jewish God commands theft and murder; he puts a lying spirit into the mouth of his prophets; he repents and grieves for his past conduct; he is a God of fury, wrath, and vengeance. These actions and qualities are all attributed to him in the Old Testament! Is it possible that any man of common sense can believe, that moral principles ...

The character of Mahomet is of a savage, military, and tyrannical cast; but he speaks in the name of heaven, and, like Moses, pretends, that his murders, cruelties, and assassinations have been sanctioned by the divinity which he adores. He frequently begins his chapters in the name of the most merciful God; but, in the course of the chapter, is sure to consign to damnation those who do not accede to the system of revelation which he has received from God. "The chosen people of the Most High", under the Jewish dispensation, took the liberty of exercising a principle of indiscriminate extirpation toward all heathen nations; the Mahometans pursued a similar course in the destructive wars wherever they have been engaged, and to which they have been conducted by their fanatic leaders. The Christian world is not a whit behind either of these two grand divisions in the exercise of a censorious and military spirit. The crusades and the domestic quarrels of the Christian church will ...

Well, as one who believes that the one and only reality necessarily is natural and godless, I can't actually resent God. But I can object to teaching vulnerable children and adults who are capable of knowing better that they must worship and adore the God described in the various holy books. Must worship ... or else. We know what "or else" means -- depending on the religious variant, it means death on the spot, eventual annihilation, or eternal spinning on the divine rotisserie. Some loving and merciful God, that. You don't have to read much of those books to be thankful that such a thing doesn't and couldn't exist. (Of course it's all fiction -- the greatest horror story ever told -- but the authors had reasons for telling those stories.) Tens of thousands were killed in God-commanded genocidal biblical wars; individuals, their families, and/or groups were burned to cinders or swallowed up by the earth merely for impudent thoughts and "murmurings,...

I think that the best way to disabuse folks of their belief in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam would be to have them read the Hebrew Bible very closely . Unbelievable! It's enough to put anyone off religion.