No good without God?

On Good Friday (the Friday before Easter, when Christ was crucified according to most Christians), the Washington Post published an op-ed piece by Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter, touting Christianity and dissing Unbelievers. Find it at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/
03/20/AR2008032003023.html (free registration required).

I entered two comments, one at the beginning, the second after 50 or so had been posted. Here they are:

Many scientists (at least in America) are religious. However, the higher you ascend in the scientific pecking order, the more likely it is that you're an empiricist. Note that I didn't say "atheist" or "skeptic." Such terms are used by theists like Gerson much as terms like "miscegenation" were used by racists in the Old South.

The simple fact is that many clearheaded people are neither religious, atheistic, nor skeptical. We aren't atheists because an atheist is someone who, when you ask him "Do you believe in God?" says "No." A skeptic is someone who answers the same question by saying "I doubt it."
But empiricists like me simply say "Your question included a word I don't understand. What do you mean by 'God'?"
Truth is you can't define that word without descending into tautology. It's no different than asking "Do you believe in Blipsquitch?" For us all your blather about God and Faith and, for that matter, atheism and skepticism, are simply irrelevant to our lives.

Calling us "atheists" is just your way of framing the debate to make you affirmers and us deniers--reminiscent of the scene in Faust when Satan appears in a puff of smoke and Faust asks "Who are thou?" And Satan says
"I am He who denies."

Well, we're empiricists--that what we actually ARE. Calling us atheists is like calling us non-Martians--it's a negative definition that says almost nothing about us.

So instead how we call us reality affirmers--and you, reality deniers?

As for your blather about how we must be religious if we're moral...this verges on solipsism. Morality of some sort is hard-wired into every social animal. You can only defeat this by raising a child with the equivalent of the wire mother in Harlow's classic monkey experiments.

Discussions about the existence of what you call "God" became irrelevant sometime around the dawn of empiricism in the 19th century. Folks like Gerson and Keller are fighting a rear-guard action that gulls a lot of people.

Yet another proof that we're genetically 98% Chimp. They don't reason very well, either--and they have a strong sense of "fairness."

To put it somewhat more charitably, human minds have a powerful tendency to connect the dots--even when the dots don't connect. And it reveals a powerful nostalgia when we imagined that the entire universe was built to house us, and that we dwell at its exact center.

So despite all their talk about morality, religious people are ultimately narcissistic. And mean spirited to boot when they strive, as Gerson does, to act as if only religious people can be moral (with the Catch-22 that if an empiricist is moral he is by definition religious).

Actually you could argue that only empiricists can be moral. We aren't bucking for a big fat reward in the hereafter, after all. Whereas religious people's altruism is almost invariably tied to winning the Infinite Lottery. How is that anything but terminally selfish?
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2nd comment:

It just amazes me that the vast majority of Americans reject--as does Gerson and his fellow travelers in these comments--the scientific thought that produced every bit of the technology they use daily, from their telephones to the computers and Internet some of them used here to disseminate their rejection.

Metaphorically they're intellectual shoplifters--taking and using what they want without paying for it. Of course for them the price would be steep. They'd have to accept the sort of rigorous, pitiless analytical thinking that engendered all this technology.

And of course that sort of thinking isn't tolerant of mush-brained thinking at all. Tolerance has its place, but not in science. In the marketplace of scientific ideas, doctrinaire hacks like Gerson get ridden out of town on a rail.

If these science deniers lived like the Amish at least they'd be intellectually honest.

Yet they think nothing of advocating a Medieval mindset via broadband, just as the Islamofascists do.

It shows how one of the miracles of the human mind is its propensity to think mutually exclusive things at the same time--without even worrying about trying to resolve the cognitive dissonance involved.

And then they have the gall to accuse us of us of their sins--the smugness, the rigidity of thought, the constant use of false choice arguments and reductio ad absurdums, arguing from false premises...it's a garden of rhetorical toadstools.

Q. What does the dyslexic agnostic insomniac do?
A. He lies awake all night, wondering if there's a Dog.