Belief, Knowledge, and Feelings

I am an atheist.

I make no pretensions about it, and compared to the likes of Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett and the like, I am probably far more militant about my position as such in the sense that I rather unequivocally support the complete eradication of all religions over the long run of humanity's future.  Perhaps I am not so foul-mouthed in my rhetoric as say, TJ Kincaid A.K.A TheAmazingAtheist on Youtube (though sometimes I wish I were), but inflammatory I am indeed.  I don't quite mean to denounce people for their beliefs so much as treat their beliefs the same way I would treat any others, which can potentially give rise to the outcome of denouncing beliefs.  It is sort of inevitable, I suppose.  If all beliefs were to be treated equally, then that further means that all beliefs are subject to the same level of scrutiny.  For religious beliefs, scrutiny of any level, even the most minimal, is something that cannot be allowed because scrutiny opens up the likelihood of certain realizations about the nature of religious belief.  It is so difficult for people to separate their beliefs from their own egos that it becomes a game of emotions.  Speaking ill of a religion such as Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, what have you, is the rebuking of a set of ideas, and yet, people project that onto themselves.  In simplest terms, though, if I were to speak ill of your religion and you in turn feel offended, it is fundamentally wrong of you to even feel insulted in the first place.

Under the blanket of "political correctness", we tend to automatically keep religion out of the field of discussion because it's considered wrong to deny people certain rights.  Furthermore, we're so afraid of offending people, that certain things can never be said.  This also makes it easy for people of certain religious affiliations to play that card of being victimized if ever something something is said about which they are not pleased.  The fact that there are propositions like the U.N. Anti-Blasphemy resolution (which is a mirror of the specifically Anti-Islamic-Blasphemy legislation passed in The Netherlands) is but a sign of this.  Closer to home, there are things like the right wing's fabricated war on Christmas.  Never mind that December has a hefty share of holidays including Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Tirukarthigai, etc.  Never mind that Christmas itself is provably not the birthday of the hypothetical Jesus Christ or that it was originally a Pagan tradition that dates back to the ancient Babylonians at least 2000 years before even the existence of Judaism, let alone Christianity.  Whether you recognize Christmas in a Christian light or not, there are cases where it is safer to use phrases that are generic to include all holidays of the season, and so you'll see "Happy Holidays" or "Season's Greetings", rather than "Merry Christmas."  Perfectly reasonable, for instance, for retailers who wish to convey the message to a broader audience who might be among their customer base.  Well, it so happens that seeing that upon seeing that, somehow Christians in the U.S. pretend that they're being oppressed because they're not getting special attention for their day which was never theirs in the first place.

It's the same with all the acts of playing the false victim when you have insufferable twats like Ben Stein pretending that believers in God are somehow ejected from academia, when in fact 100% of his examples as such were provably cases of people abusing the system and violating the rules.  Naturally, Ben Stein makes a point of leaving out these sorts of details and also seems to forget that the very same academia in which he earned his credentials in the field of economics is not a system that offers any level of forgiveness.  Like much of the rest of the world, you're out after only a single strike.

If I were to sum up religion in one word, it would be ignorance.  It is, at its very heart all about ignorance.  In colloquial language, we think of the word "ignorant" in the same light as "stupid" or "idiotic", but in the strict usage of language or for that matter, in an academic arena, it simply means "does not know."  And religion is all about not knowing.  People are always seeking explanations for things they don't understand or can't explain.  Ascribing occurrences to magical beings made for a convenient way not to have to deal with the effort involved in finding truly thorough explanations.  For the majority of people in this day and age, they cling to religion and idiotic beliefs so often due to fear of the unknown.  They are not able to cope with mortality and want something to provide them with a message that death is not the end.  They are unable or unwilling to think about questions of how to create their own purpose in life and seek out a message which claims to provide a defined purpose without their needing to think about it.  Even for those people who don't ascribe things to a deity by default, there is a point where their intellects fail them.  Whether you're talking about the brainless babblings of some senile evangelist such as a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, or you're talking about brilliant minds throughout history, at some point, their ability to think deeper fails them and religion lets that particular scope of ignorance be accepted by way of celestial cop-out.

Isaac Newton Take for instance, Isaac Newton.  No one can doubt that he was religious and grew up in pretty strictly religious surroundings.  It is also arguable that he had no real choice in the matter given that no one in the entire country ever did in his day.  Even aside from the fact that England had and still to this day has a national church organization, it's also just the fact that religion in religious households is trained into people from day one, and in a country and time period where nearly all households were staunchly religious, it pretty much means that there was no chance for Newton not to be flooded with exposure to religion throughout his formative years.

In spite of that, no one can say that Newton was an idiot by any measure, and certainly not an idiot of calibre comparable to Pat Robertson and the like.  To quote Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Newton can be characterized as "unimpeachably brilliant."  And in all his works on physics, mathematics, optics, etc. not once is "God" invoked.  Why?  Because there was no need to bring supernatural deities into the picture.  He'd solved all those problems through the application of his own intellect.  The creation of differential and integral calculus?  He certainly didn't find answers to such questions in scripture.  While it's conceivable that he might have relied on his beliefs and the occasional prayer to calm his demeanor enough to regain composure during moments of frustration (which, if he was for instance Buddhist would have been handled by meditation instead), there's no real direct evidence that this happened.  Especially considering that his magnum opus, the Principia and his diaries/letters/etc. at the time never so much as mentioned the word "God."  Whether that means he had no use for his religious beliefs or that the invocations thereof were innocuous (i.e. not worth mentioning) is not certain, but given his upbringing, the latter is more likely.

At some point, though, this "unimpeachably brilliant" mind hit upon some limits.  That appeared when he worked to solve the multi-body problem.  While his Law of Universal Gravitation worked quite simply and straightforward in two-body simulations, the picture gets massively complex (in that you have to contend with a far larger number of simultaneous interactions) when you start introducing more and more bodies into the mix.  A 3-body problem is massively more complicated than 2 bodies, and 4 makes it massively more complex still.  At some point, Newton helplessly swallowed the blue pill.  He could no longer wrestle with this trying to deal with the sun, the then-known 6 planets, all their respective known moons, and so on, so he threw up his hands and said that the stability of the orbits was the work of God.  A related point here would be to include the story of how Laplace managed to solved the problem 100 years later and when asked why God was never invoked in any of his works, he replied by saying "I had no need of that hypothesis."  However, to me, the thing worth mentioning is not that that someone else came along who could solve the problem because he didn't have God-on-the-brain, but rather the impact it made in the case of Newton.  In terms of intellectual capacity, there's little doubt that Newton could have handled the work.  Laplace, though he needed to advance the technique of perturbation theory to solve the multi-body problem, this same mathematical technique did not derive from anything Newton himself didn't know.  Rather, it relied on a different perspective to the analysis of the problem as opposed to the apparently brute-force solution that Newton felt he needed to employ.  The limiting factor in Newton's intellect here wasn't an issue of capacity, but more likely that his perspective on how to solve the problem was too rigid and narrow, and so he gave up, and theism gave him his free way out.

Now it's easy to say this was a harmless outcome, except for one issue.  Not only did religion give him a sort of blind cop-out (something which is still true for many today), it also killed his interest in the field.  Discovering and investigating things like the laws of motion and the development of the calculus and so on. Like so many before and after him, he did so in order to satisfy his curious and inquisitive mind.  Even for scientists and engineers and just your general geek or grad student or whoever, people explore the search for solutions to some problems because it interests them -- "That's a cool problem, I want to figure it out."  There has never been a single person who solved a problem because they believed holy scripture told them to.  Rather, they had an inbuilt curiosity that drove them forward.  While some might have like to rationalize that said curiosity was the product of their god's will, saying that is little more than deeper indulgence in the delusion and it really doesn't change the fact that curiosity was the key element.  The more tragic side of the celestial cop-out in a case like this is that all further work in the field simply stopped dead.  Not only did he feel he could get away from the problem by invoking God, but the beliefs also led him to believe that he didn't cop out at all, and rather provided a complete and irrefutable answer -- i.e. he thought he was done, and so there was nothing more to be done.

Another, probably more tragic example would be that of Islam throughout the Middle East.  From the 9th-12th centuries, the then expanding Islamic caliphate was the center of cosmopolitan thinking, learning, science, mathematics, medicine, etc.  The impact felt to this day on modern science is pretty staggering to say the least.  Concepts like algebra and algorithms, instruments like sextants and astrolabes, the names of countless stars, or for that matter, Arabic numerals...  all come from Muslim mathematicians, astrologers, etc. from this time period.  The cultural capital of the world at this time was in Baghdad.  How did it end?  Well, that's where religion becomes religion.  All it took was an imam to deliver the message that scientific study that didn't have any immediately apparent practical application was an unholy pursuit and that basic research, and sadly enough, mathematics as well was the work of the devil.  I should clarify that when I say "basic research" here, I'm referring to the academic term regarding research which does not seek to solve specific problems, but rather serves to increase general knowledge and understanding about something such that further useful work down the line can have some foundations off of which to build.  On the surface, basic research appears to the layman to be a waste of time, but its purpose is more forward-looking than the here and now.  The average Joe might simply use words like "useless" or "waste of time" rather than words like unholy.  The closest thing we have in the modern day would be Sarah Palin's condemnation of basic research in genetics performed using fruit flies as a waste of time and money.  While that is objectively wrong, it is at least a choice of words which isn't so outright dangerous or fear-inspiring.  The key difference with al Ghazali, though, is that he said such things are unholy and/or are the work of the devil.  Aside from the fact that nothing good could ever come of such a philosophy in the first place, the use of such particularly religious language scares people.  Because it appeals directly to emotion and not in the least bit to the intellect, the reactions are more immediate and profoundly felt, and any sort of critical analysis of the idea is forgone because you're circumventing the act of thinking and replacing it with the act of feeling.  The end result is that the way of thinking changed and much like the case of Newton, discovery and investigation into real-world knowledge stopped completely dead.  The culture changed in such a way as to embrace revelation and mindless stagnation in favor of exploration and progress, and it has never recovered since.

Before you think, though, that such occurrences are no longer likely in this day and age of greater scientific and technological development, one need only look at conditions as they are now.  A story like that of Kurt Wise is a fine modern counterpart to anecdotes about great thinkers of ages past such as Newton, Huygens, etc.  Here you have a guy who had the benefit of a top-tier education in geology and did his graduate studies under none other than Stephen Jay Gould.  This is the same guy who went through the arduous exercise of taking a pair of scissors to a Bible and cutting out anything that plainly disagreed with science.  In his own words, what remained was relatively insignificant and fell utterly flat.  Given this, you might think he renounced religion, but in fact, he went the other way and declared that even if scientific facts completely disagreed with the scripture, he would still follow the literal interpretation of the Bible for the simple reason that it is holy according to his faith.  Now, I know this may seem like an extreme example, but it is no less real, and the point is not that the man himself was completely obstinate or lacked the intellectual capacity to learn certain things which are actually true.  I would only really characterize him as a complete idiot in the sense that what capacity he does have is willfully being squandered and ensured not to be put to use.  Indeed, as the story itself demonstrates, Kurt Wise was more than capable of looking at his geological studies and compare and contrast against scripture in a very level-headed way.  Regardless, the childhood indoctrination inflicted upon him by his family and the community in which he grew up shattered his mind to the point where it was easier to let go of reality than it was to let go of fantasy.

In India, followers of Sai Baba attribute unto him all sorts of miraculous powers such as magically manifesting food, jewelery, spices, toys, sacramental items like vibuthi, kumkum, mangalsutras, etc.  Others claim that he is able to levitate, walk through walls, transform water into diesel fuel, be in two places simultaneously, curing blindness, and apparently control the weather.  Yes, people both in backwater rural villages and in developed industrialized city surroundings all somehow follow this person.  To people in the West, who are likely unfamiliar with the Sai Baba movement, what largely adds to the horror here is the fact that this isn't some ancient figure from ages long forgotten.  This is a movement that began in the 20th century.  The figurehead who calls himself Sathya Sai Baba is very much alive today and in his early 80s.  In the countless invitations people have enacted to have his claims of divinity tested and/or verified under controlled conditions, he invariably declines and dodges the matter with double-talk about how science is confined to the human senses while divine power transcends the senses, or that the physical manifestations of his powers are only a small portion of what they really are.  Every time, it is veritably textbook bullcrap that seems as if it was taught in some sort of Charlatanism & Fraud 101 course, but those who follow him would accept it completely uncritically.

I happen to have been brought up in a Vaishnavite Brahmin household, though in effect, it was sort of an atheist household at the same time.  While I had grandparents, aunts and uncles and the like who were extremely devout and bigoted at the same time, my own parents were not particularly religious at all, and my father at least declares himself to be an atheist.  Naturally, being that many relatives have all been engineers, I grew up surrounded by math and science and general engineering textbooks.  I can't really claim with any sort of absolute certainty that during these early years of my life that I did not believe in a God.  Rather, what I was was closer to what Bill Maher calls an "apatheist", which he coined during an interview as a portmanteau of "theist" and "apathy."  Whether there was a God or not was something that didn't really interest me.  And even now, I'd say that's still true to an extent, in that I don't particularly care if some question actually really does have the answer of "God did it," because how God did it is the really interesting question.  While I'm on that subject, this is exactly the thing that inherently and without question disqualifies the fraudulent politico-religious movement referred to as "Intelligent Design" from being considered a scientific theory.  Even if, for the sake of argument, I were to grant that a deity did the deed, if it doesn't explain how something happened, it's not a theory.  Saying that a mythical "designer" did something, whether true or not only raises the question of how the designer did it, what the designer did, and/or how those actions manifested in reality, what grants the designer the capacity to do it, and so on.  You're simply renaming the mystery without so much as an attempt to solve it, and in turn multiplying the number of questions.  You can't get more intellectually counterproductive than that.

In any case, what was it that ultimately moved me from "apatheist" to atheist?  Functioning brain cells and increased exposure to a greater variety of religions and religious people...  and that's including both the idiots and not-quite-idiots.  I would be lying if I were to say there was never a time where some teachings in Hinduism looked attractive aside from all the mythology, but in the end, I realized I was committing the same fallacious errors that idiot subscribers to other religions were doing.  While I still feel that the only reason ever to consider acceptance of any religion is on the basis of agreeing with its lessons and concepts, this is a point that needs to apply to all of it.  I don't think it would take much to point out the problems with religious extremism or fanaticism.  Whether you want to talk about the likes of Fred Phelps or Osama Bin Laden, it's all in the same field of evil.  But then it might be a little harder to make the case for more moderate examples.  The most common defense that people will make in the name of religion is that most people aren't that bad.  Unfortunately, this argument falls apart on a few levels.  One, there is the simple fact that religion is relatively radical to begin with.  By that, I mean to say that they are outdated relics of a time long past which are butting up against a modern era in which they do not belong.  This doesn't mean that there is zero relevant wisdom espoused in any religious text, but that any such wisdom carries with it a tremendous amount of inexcusable baggage.  That baggage placed into a context of a society which has progressed far beyond where it might have been relevant creates rather atrocious results.  Now, you might be reading this and thinking that not everybody follows all that "outdated" stuff, and when talking about population as a whole, you'd be right.  But that doesn't change the fact that all that outdated stuff is in there, and there will always be something for someone to latch onto.  By comparison, the laws of society are constantly reviewed and adjusted to move with the changing tides of morality and ethics of the day, and do so not only by adding new dictates, but repealing old outdated ones.  The fact that religion encourages that ideas be accepted without critical thought in any form means that it is so easy to take one of those ideas to heart very seriously, and that includes all the bad stuff.  The end effect of speaking directly to emotion means that what you have in religious texts is powerful language that motivates people in ways that cannot be so easily done when speaking to the intellect, and in turn allows them to support just about any philosophy you can possibly imagine.

If by chance, you do not necessarily have a philosophy like that of Ted Haggard or George Galloway, then congratulations -- you're not representative of your religion.  You're representative of an otherwise ordinary person of the current era who can't let go of an association to an ancient belief system and rather helplessly try to shoehorn that belief system into the same modern era in which you live.  Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism...  they're all bad or at least stupid in some way.  But for all that, there are people who will say, "but what about this good part?"  For instance, the Swaminarayan sect is full of misogyny that places women at a pretty low status.  People like to counter this by saying that Swaminarayan abolished practices like Sati (tossing a widow onto her late husband's funeral pyre), and saying that therefore, it is liberating to women.  This is of course, terribly weak because it doesn't change the fact that the same sect also espouses that women cannot even be seen by men while they are engaged in worship, and that men of the cloth should not eat food which has been prepared or in some cases, even looked at, by a woman.  Yet people will somehow twist this to say that this is liberating towards women in some feeble attempt to rationalize it.  Perhaps, though, you could argue that while sexist, this isn't so bad compared to some other religions.  Islam, for instance, puts women at a lower status than Jim Crow laws put blacks.  Sure, it may not always be universally true that Muslim men beat their wives, but it doesn't change the fact that it is prescribed and encouraged in the Kor'an.  Stories like that of Aqsa Parvez or Palestina Isa, two cases of teenage girls murdered by their parents for the crime of not wearing a hijab or in the latter case, for taking a part-time job w/o permission, are fine examples of how miserable atrocities are considered a proper act in Islam.  And while these sound like the kinds of things you might expect to hear about in the Middle East, these so-called "honor killings" took place in North America.  One in Ontario, and the other in Missouri.

When you hear quotes like the quote that "a nuclear war would have no more effect than moving millions of people into paradise a little sooner than they would otherwise get there," whose name comes to mind as the person who might say such a thing?  Well, most people would probably either guess a radical Islamic figurehead, or some American evangelical/pentecostal leader among those who tend to like to monger war.  As it so happens, it was Michael Ramsey, then the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1964.  When you read a quote along the lines that 'AIDS is the divine punishment of a just God for improper sexual behavior,' the names that leap to mind might be Jerry Falwell or Fred Phelps or Pat Robertson.  Most people wouldn't have guessed that quote actually came from the mouth of Mother Teresa.  Well, this is the same woman who started a cult of suffering wherein the goal was to maximize the pain that people felt as well as the expanse of time they felt it as they approached a horrible death so that she could personally come to a greater understanding of Christ's supposed suffering on the cross... so it's not unusual that she would spew some garbage here and there. Whether you find that surprising or not, what is the case is that these people are far more representative of the religion as it actually is than most.

Yet again, the same argument keeps coming forth...  most religious people aren't that bad.  Most people of a particular religion don't follow those types of things which are outdated parts of the religious dogma.  Christians exemplify this by arguing with the point of "Oh, well, that's the Old Testament stuff, not the New Testament."  Ummmmm...  so when did the Old Testament cease to be part of the Bible?  I mean, you can point to things like the "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone quote", and though that quote is largely determined to have been added to the Bible around the 10th century CE, it is part of the Bible.  But then if you agree with that and not with the statements that condone slavery (and those exist in the New Testament as well), then why even keep those parts around?  Why should it have to be an all or nothing deal?  Why haven't moderate Christians adopted something akin to a 21st century counterpart to the Jefferson Bible?  If the morality by which we live our day-to-day lives is a dynamic and changing thing, why shouldn't the religion also be subject to the same change, if at least to make it relevant?  Furthermore, if you're willing to pick and choose which parts of the Bible you agree with, doesn't that itself indicate that you already have a standard by which you're passing judgment on the texts you hold so dear?  In reality, what you're doing is subscribing to a secular moral code and filtering the holy texts through that.  Some people are a little more strict in their filtering than others, but either way, it renders scripture itself fairly inert in defining opinions on morality as one would already have that standard to begin with, and all that is not ignored within the scripture is nothing more than a reiteration of the very same ideas you would already hold.  Rather, what it holds that is not so inert is a whole lot of other ideas which are primed for absorption into your mind because they're riding along with a whole bunch of others.

Moderate muslims speak out against terrorism.

This comes to my other point about why the "most religious people are moderate" argument fails.  The problem isn't that people aren't moderate, but that this argument is used to validate religion completely including that which isn't so moderate.  It is a silly game that promotes complacence by shifting the topic.  It is used to justify that religion should remain off-limits entirely, no matter what comes of it.  Just because most religious people aren't crazy, doesn't mean that we should let the minority go crazy.  Has no one ever heard the phrase that evil persists because good men do nothing?  Has no one ever heard of the single bad egg who ruins it for everybody else?  The problems of fundamentalism occur not because the crazies are great in number, but because they are great in the degree of damage they are capable of doing and nothing is done to mitigate the problem.  Worse yet, the moderately religious crowd is much more prone to effectively protect the crazies by sweeping them away from notice and trying to associate the hatred towards the extremists with hatred for all religious people.  Then again, it's not as if hatred of religious ideas is totally unworthy, but the key point here is that ideas are worthy of rebuke, while people are simply victims of the crime of religion.  For every word written in a given religious doctrine that promotes a positive idea, you are just as likely to find something which is quite deplorable, if not more so.  In many other aspects of life, this is generally dealt with by stripping away those more reprehensible ideas when you come across them and realize that they are problematic.  However, religion has the unfortunate property of not being amenable to taking a la carte.  This means that any and every person to whom you've made your belief system attractive has a correspondingly proportionate chance of doing good as doing bad.  Every person attracted to religion is open to any given part of the dogma and the fact that their minds are more prone to receive ideas from the doctrine uncritically means the danger of creating a monster is always there; the "nice church lady" can just as easily give rise to the next Wayne Bent.  Just as the ideas are not taken a la carte, neither is the human constituency.

Where religion is harmful, it is explicitly harmful, but it is much harder to say the same thing when religion is helpful.  I don't mean to say that there is nothing in any holy text that has any merit, but that messages of merit in a general sense can only speak to their own merits as individual messages and this is something that is wholly forgotten in religion.  One good message does not extrinsically lend merit by association to separate ideas just because you'll find those other ideas in the same book.  If an idea has merit of its own, then it doesn't need the addition of a supernatural delivery to stand on those merits.  If you can find those merits in the messages of the holy scripture in isolation that way, then that in turn means you have some way of determining those messages as meritorious, which means you're getting nothing out of it you didn't already know.  This is one of the great differences between methodological philosophies and religion.  Nobody says that Kepler's Laws of motion are true because Kepler was able to fire an arrow through a row of 14 tree trunks.  Nobody says that evolution is true because Darwin's mother never slept with anybody.  Yet somehow words spoken by religious leaders are lent weight, not by any intrinsic value in the words themselves, but by the fact that some magical properties are attributed to them.  The fact that the story claims Jesus could turn water into wine somehow lends creedence to his words.  How?  That's just the way religious people think.  I could take for instance, the Socratic Method, which is indeed sound and with merit.  But just like Jesus, there isn't any reasonable or contemporaneous evidence to suggest that Socrates actually existed.  He may well just be an artificial creation of Plato either as a character in a tale, or a sort of mechanism he used to lend merit to his ideas by way of an appeal to authority.  Whatever the case, to those who are rational, it simply doesn't matter in the least.  The value of Socrates' words stand on their own no matter who actually thought of them.  This is simply not so with religion.  The value of Jesus' words are inextricable from the divine miracles claimed about his supposed life.  The value of Rama's dictates are inextricable from his purported superhuman power.  The value of Mohammed's hadiths are inextricable from his supposed role as a prophet of Allah.

The counteracting arm of this is that many ideas out there which are condemned tend to be condemned not on their own lack of merits, but on the basis of whose words they are.  Literally, the policy is one of judging a book by its author.  As a counterexample to the previous examples of religious tripe, take the quote 'Letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is the policy for promoting the progress of the arts and sciences and a flourishing culture in our land.'  Before you try to think of who said that, think about the value of the statement itself.  Is it morally and ethically reprehensible?  If I told you that it was a quote from Mao Tse-Tung, does that change your judgment?  For the religious, it generally does, because religion means already subscribing to a belief system which assigns merits by association.  And so they also assign rebuke by association.

This in turn yields a problem when trying to reconcile science with religion.  There are fundamental traditions and belief systems in religion which are followed simply because they are followed.  Tradition is just a word that serves as a euphemism for "I don't think for myself."  Faith is just a flowery way of saying "I don't think at all."  This may sound harsh to some, but it is by no means inappropriate.  When I say that tradition equals not thinking for oneself, I mean that the sole reason why people tend to follow traditions at all is simply because they are traditions.  This doesn't mean that all traditional practices are without a shred of merit, but that merit is simply not part of the equation when people actually carry out those traditions.  Instead, they are upheld because somehow "it's tradition" is a good enough reason.  That is precisely why tradition is necessarily equivalent to not thinking for oneself.  For example, if we thought about why traditional etiquette demands that we don't put our elbows on the table, we can at least arrive at the realization that elbows aren't among the most dexterous parts of our bodies and the chances of clumsily knocking something over when our elbows are placed at a particularly high resting point seem rather high.  That at least gives us good reason to follow said rule upon serious consideration.  If only we put all practices under such consideration, or at least spread the knowledge and groundings behind the practices we do follow in general.  Well, this is something a lot of people don't really want, because it could just as easily put a stop to traditional practices as it could to confirm the merit of some of them.  In India, we have an archaic practice of validating marital prospects on the basis of horoscopes.  Any serious examinations grounded in reality would make it clear that this is an absurdity of the highest order.  The idea that human lives can be affected by the lines of sight from Earth to glowing orbs of swirling superheated gases located hundreds or thousands of light years away is just incredibly silly.  It befuddles me at times that anybody even thought of such an inexplicably bizarre concept.  It's one thing to look at the motion of the heavens and detect a pattern, and given a certain level of lacking comprehension, maybe even presume that the pattern and order is a guided and directed process lying under the control of some ultimate being...  but to make the leap from a presumed order to the notion that said order actually directs or provides some sort of indications about human lives is either incredibly insane, incredibly arrogant, or both.

Then there is faith -- probably the worst thing you can have as a human being, and yet all religions rely upon it as an absolute necessity.  Faith is simply belief without supporting evidence.  In short, it's universally bad.  Moreover, this is the most clear point where religion is diametrically opposed to science.  Science cannot ever allow faith, whereas religion cannot allow lack thereof.  The sole reason why faith is sold as a virtue is because religion needs faith in order to persist.  It needs people to buy into unbelievable stories and accept them as true without even considering it open to criticism.  It needs to sell people on accepting ideas from certain sources without a single thought.  There are not ways for faith to be reasonable or have even a shred of rationality because it requires a lack of thought in order to function.  Without actual evidence to support a line of thinking, there is no way for that line of thinking to be reasonable to have.  Even if your beliefs are somehow shown to be true, faith is an infinitely poor basis on which to found said beliefs.  If anything, it would weaken your case.  Any time that someone's argument falls back on "well, that's where you need to have faith", that is tantamount to an admission that there is no reason whatsoever to believe those beliefs.  Reasonable grounds for believing something must exist first before it ought to be believed.  This is the fundamental difference between religion and well...  reality.  In a lot of senses, people who claim that the moon landing was a hoax are actually more reasonable than those who are religious because they at least have some evidence on which to base their beliefs, however spurious and wrong that evidence happens to be.

People like to argue that lack of faith is equivalent to a lack of open-mindedness.  This is of course based not only on terribly flawed thinking but a fundamental failure to understand what it means to be open-minded.  Open-minded simply means willing to consider new ideas.  It does not mean you have no criteria on which to accept or not to accept those ideas.  Accepting new ideas unconditionally without exercising any sort of filtering mechanism with which to separate what ideas are valid and what ideas aren't doesn't mean you're open-minded.  It means you're gullible.  Nobody wins awards for open-mindedness on the basis of how much stuff they believe...  and simply believing things in order to believe them isn't a particularly wise way of reaching new levels of understanding.  An open mind which simply lets things in freely is very likely to let in a whole lot of garbage.  When you put garbage in, you're almost certain to get garbage out.  Regardless, the very people who argue this from the perspective of saying that not having faith makes you closed-minded are the last ones who should ever talk about open-mindedness.  It is those who subscribe to religion on the basis of blind faith (as if there is any other kind) who are far less likely to be open-minded in any sense.
Math Atheist?
The problem with supernatural explanations is that they are never explanations for anything at all, but rather simple shifting of unknowns to a new designation which give the impression that the problem is solved.  For the person who accepts such arguments on the basis of faith, simply saying that a magical or spiritual force did the job is entirely convincing.  Because of this power to convince the user, it becomes an easy crutch upon which all arguments from ignorance can easily rest.  Because it is convincing not merely on a level of perceived satisfaction of ignorance and also on an emotional level due to its connection to the human ego (more on this later), a person who relies on supernatural explanations on the basis of faith are more likely to offer it as the only conceivable explanation with the tendency to make fallacious causal links and dismiss other explanations out of hand -- this is quite clearly the definition of closed-mindedness.  Often times, due to the emotional connection to their beliefs, they also see things in the black and white separation between their own faith and everything that doesn't fit with that picture, which only further inhibits the likelihood that they will see things clearly and rationally.  The only thing they really seek is to have their own beliefs accepted by others so that they can have the satisfaction of believing in their own vindication.  To these people, "open-minded" means "agreeing with me."

People who attempt to use real world information or lack thereof in order to justify their faith-based beliefs often drive down the path of mysteries...  or at least what they perceive to be mysteries.  This argument is entirely wrong because if a condition or experience can't be explained, that in no way provides evidence in support of a supernatural deity.  All it really shows is that your purported mystery can't be explained.  To argue that an unexplained means "God did it" is entirely contradictory, as you're claiming that an explanation exists for that which you had claimed to defy explanation.  It is no different from those who argue that aliens from outer space are visiting us all the time.  "I don't know what that thing in the sky is, therefore it must be aliens!"  In a truly logical and rational line of thought, "I don't know what that thing in the sky is" is where the discussion would stop.  If you don't know, you simply don't know.  It is flagrant arrogance which projects that a magical deity did or still does things specifically so that human life could carry on as we wish it to or that the lines of sight from our planet to glowing orbs of swirling superheated gases located thousands of light years away relative to the lines of sight to much less distant orbs of rock and/or gas somehow affects our lives.  This same arrogance also projects that aliens from a far off planet would somehow find our tiny blue dot and be intrigued enough to mechanically rape us for some reason.

Often times, I hear the argument that a strictly naturalistic viewpoint is closed-minded because it doesn't entertain the possibility of something beyond reality.  This is of course a completely nonsensical point.  Demanding real evidence in order to accept an idea does not mean I won't entertain the possibility...  it means something real has to persuade me.  You might argue that because the posited being exists outside of our plane of existence, then it isn't subject to our capacity to observe.  Well, if it is a being that wholly exists outside our universe, then it is completely and utterly irrelevant to existence in every way and demands zero consideration.  If it does undertake actions that intersect with our reality, then that necessarily means that some observable manifestation of those actions have to exist.  If you dare to argue that those things are occurring at a scale and scope that we can't perceive and is thus outside our capacity to observe, then you have enough trouble even trying to explain how you know it's there.  But making the claim that there are no properties about God which are physical in a sense that we can comprehend, you're still putting this being into a state where its existence cannot be supported by reason, logic, or evidence even in principle alone.  If indeed some event occurred that defied the explanation of even the greatest minds on Earth, that still wouldn't justify assigning that event to a specific divine agency.  It would at best indicate a being or a collective of beings with power, intelligence, and/or technology which is unknown to us and beyond our apprehension.  Furthermore, if such a being or collective was capable of manipulating things in reality to the point of affecting our own perception, then it could quite easily disguise its identity such that we may never be able to determine who or what it was.

If you are to argue that a quantum field state fluctuation that triggered the Big Bang was in fact the "God" that created the universe, this is a pretty loose definition of "God."  In a lot of ways, it reduces "God" to nothing more than a liguistic convenience that makes things easier to grasp for the layman since the word is so pervasive in our lexicon.  Indeed, a large number of non-religious scientists do use the word "God" in this way.  You could even argue that an intelligence manipulated the state of the quantum field in order to trigger the creation of the universe, and even if I were to have all the knowledge in the world at my disposal, I could never really form a solid and cogent argument that there could not possibly be such an entity.  But while such an idea may be able to satisfy the deist, who doesn't have a very specific definition of God, the theist, and furthermore the subscriber to a specific set of religious beliefs still has all his/her work remaining.  The deities of any specific religious dogma can have a variety of other properties including such things as immortality, superhuman strength, capacity to cast grand illusions, capacity to listen to and answer prayers, etc.  Even if you could argue about a being, you'd still have a number of other conditions that demand their own evidence and need to be independently verified on their own.  Sorry, but "I feel it" is a completely meaningless argument because personal feelings have absolutely no bearing on truth.  I could sincerely believe with all my heart that I am Teddy Roosevelt, but that wouldn't mean that I actually am.

The worst part of it all, though, to me is the end effect of the fact that every region of the world, every culture has its own picture of what God is and properties it has.  And the power of the specificity of these beliefs is one that ultimately creates giant rifts between people.  We have wars over disagreement as to what God actually is and what he said to people.  If a God ever did appear and tell us all to stop fighting each other, I'm sure all that would happen is that people would argue as to whose God it was that delivered the message of peace.  That's how little there is in actual thought.  It's all about personal feelings and emotions, and nothing whatsoever to do with reality or matters that are actually true.  As such, it is fair to say that faith is a personal matter, but that is different from saying that such personal ideas are worthy of respect in an environment where things are no longer about individuals.  Respect is earned, not given freely.  Even previously earned respect can easily be squandered or simply lost as old ideas fall by the wayside in favor of newer better ideas.  Change is the one true certainty.  Either keep up or get left behind.

One of the things about respecting religion is that people seem to be unable to differentiate "religion" and "religious people."  To the religious, there's basically no difference between the two, and so they can't tell the difference between criticizing religion itself and directly offending religious people.  The fact that people cannot actually separate themselves from the ideas on which they were raised is rather telling of a number of things.  It should come of no surprise that there is a strong emotional attachment to such beliefs because it is generally drilled into people's minds from an early age to seek solace and comfort in such things.  The other factor, is of course, the ego factor in that people who have been raised on these beliefs would feel a certain blow to their egos to find that these beliefs they've always held true are actually patently false.  This is also why there is such a strong need for these people to affirm their own beliefs to themselves, either by gathering among other believers and/or by spewing garbage onto others who don't subscribe to their bullshit.  Nonetheless, equating the idiotic beliefs with the "indoctrinees" of those beliefs is tantamount to equating a violent crime with its victim(s).

To be exact, though, fallacies of equivocation abound throughout the philosophies that religious people use to rationalize their beliefs.  For instance, Anselm's ontological argument is one that rests entirely on fallacies of equivocation.  It's a rather laughable approach which tries to "define" God into existence.

Ontological argument --
Premise 1 : God is defined as the greatest of all conceivable beings
Premise 2 : God exists in the mind.
Premise 3 : That which exists in the mind and in reality is necessarily greater than that which exists only in the mind.
Conclusion : God must exist in reality, as it is not possible for anything to be greater than God, else he would not be God.

The most obvious problem is simply Premise 2 which places existence in reality as an attribute of greatness.  This is really ridiculous, because in no way is existence an attribute of anything.  Existence is a condition which needs to be held for something to have attributes in the first place.  There are countless attributes which can serve to corroborate the purported greatness of God, but you can't include existence as one of them.  For any attributes I can assign to any thing which I conceive, whether it actually exists or not, all those attributes are properties which would apply to that thing if indeed it existed.  By placing existence as an attribute, you are saying that if it existed, it would have to exist -- a tautology.  A particularly weird thing about Premise 2 to me, though, is not just that it defines existence as a characteristic, but that it puts it as an attribute of greatness that supersedes all others.  By that definition, if God did not exist, but Satan did, then Satan would be greater than God.  Anybody have a problem with that?  But then of course, there is the equivocation fallacy in both premises 2 and 3 where you are equating existence in reality and existence in the mind.  Things don't exist in the mind in the way they exist in actuality.  Does the PC on which I'm typing this exist in my mind?  No, it does not.  The concept of it, and the knowledge of its many properties does, but not the PC itself.  To equate the two is just plain wrong.  Similarly, God does not exist in the mind at all...  the concept of God exists in the mind.  That concept cannot exist in actuality in any form because ideas are simply not tangible in any space.  It is simply an idea.  The existence of anything in actuality has no link to existence of its concept in the mind, and in turn there isn't anything which can possibly exist in both spaces.  A counterargument that I've heard for this objection is that God's very nature includes an omnipresence and omnipotence such that God can exist in any form in any realm, including the space of the mind.  However, this raises the problem of having to pose yet another premise that not only does God exist, but his properties demand that he can either transmute himself into an idea, in which case he can exist in the mind, or that he can simply exist physically in the mind by way of supernatural omnipresence...  or possibly both seeing as how this God is presumably all-powerful.  Well, this is a fairly loaded premise, and it is certainly not one which cannot be taken by fiat alone just because you define God a certain way and needs to be verified by separate means.  This is also one reason why the Premise 1 also fails.  You're simply defining the conception of a hypothetical God as the limit of all conceptual greatness.  Aside from the fact that it commits the same equivocation fallacy of the idea of a God (which can be conceived) with an actual God (which cannot be conceived at all), it anyway fails to define exactly how God is great.  For instance, there are countless ways in which the God of the Judeo-Christian religions is absolutely not at all great.  Similarly, I could point out ways in which Krishna is not perfect nor is he at the limits of conceivable greatness.  Same for Ahura Mazda or Zeus or Odin or whoever.  Unfortunately, the religious dogma doesn't go down that path -- it declares that God is greatest of all beings because he is said to be because he is said to be because he is said to be.  However, because greatness is an attribute that should apply to God should he exist, it is a designation unto God, rather than part of God's definition.  That is a key difference, and it leaves you with an argument for God's existence for which all of its premises are fallacious, and at least once over if not twice or thrice over.  You can't do much worse than that.

Nonetheless, it's a popular argument for a simple reason -- it manages to sound cogent by way of playing loosely with language.  When you play loosely with language, you can find ways to sneak in support for just about any possibility.  It's because of loose usage of language that allows creationists to delude themselves that evolution's status as "only a theory" actually makes for a passable argument.  It's by way of poor understanding of language that creationists almost invariably define atheism to be something it is not, or that atheism and agnosticism are mutually exclusive.  It's because of loose usage of language that you have ignorant morons like Ben Stein who conflate the objectivity of the science with freedom of speech.  All you have to do is make up your own meanings for things and you're always automatically right because it sounds that way to you.  Of course, to be convinced by that sort of rhetoric, which is all but invariably accompanied by a massive spewing of demagoguery, one need only register the overall sense of reasonability by association to specific ideas mentioned therein without any sort of thought into the actual meaning or ideas presented...  and often those specific ideas aren't even valid themselves, but simply speak to emotion rather than to the intellect... just like religion.

Speaking to emotion and circumventing has a number of useful applications, particularly in advertising.  It's one of the reasons why Apple's iPhone is the de facto touchscreen smartphone, or why Youtube is the Internet's hub of video entertainment.  Sometimes, the end product of this is generally a good thing.  For instance, Martin Luther King was the figurehead of the civil rights movement not because he was the greatest orator or he suffered the most, but because he spoke first to the reasoning and feelings for it before speaking of what it is one had to do.  That moves people far more effectively than pure exposition.  It is a unique aspect of human communication that we are the only creature able to communicate vicarious experiences.  Where another animal might be able to tell its compatriots "There's a predator hiding behind that tree!", we're able to say "I came back from collecting food and I saw a predator hiding behind that tree!"  No small difference.  It is a difference which is functionally significant in strengthening the ties of our social units.  And because we are able to communicate vicarious experiences to one another, we are also able to birth mutual understanding of one another's experiences and experiences that share emotions are more immediately powerful than intellectual messages.  The limbic system of our brains controls emotion, gut feeling, instinct, etc.  It has no capacity for language, reason, or even any of the products of thought which we would consider to be uniquely human.  It is by far older and more primitive than the neocortex and frontal lobes, but it is also closer to the end of the chain to the brain stem, and it is the final word in our decision-making.  The outer, newer layers of the brain, AKA, the neocortex or gray matter is responsible for our rational thought, reason, as well as complex global thought processes that give rise to things like music, art, poetry, imagination, etc.  However, that part of our brains needs to work a lot harder and apply a great deal more information to influence our decisions than the limbic brains.  How many times have you heard a person analyze a large amount of information, but still come back with the statement that "something doesn't feel right about it"?  That's a direct reflection of this handicap placed on our rational minds.  Religion delivers its message by completely bypassing the intellect and speaking directly to the emotional mind.  It offers unimaginable rewards, and threatens intolerable punishments.  It lifts the ego by marking individuals as somehow special even with respect to the entirety of the universe.  It offers comfort by clearing away fears of the unknown by teaching you not to think.  It offers comfort by clearing away fears of mortality by saying that there is no such thing as mortality in the first place.

This in turn means that in terms of delivering its message, religion is quick and easy, while reason and logic are quite the opposite.  A simile to this can be seen in the Star Wars definitions of the two sides of The Force.  The Dark Side is described as quicker and easier, and also allows you to draw from the strength of your emotions...  mainly anger and hatred.  Religion in a nutshell.  The Light Side of The Force is more arduous and methodical, and also tends to demand that people bury their feelings and preconceived notions do not allow them to influence their thinking...  much like science.  Though the overall concept itself is still recognized as a religion across the board, it's fairly clear which is more religion-like in its approach.  How convenient that that is also the side which is characterized as evil.  Hint, hint.

Even at its mildest, religion is a powerfully corrosive thing because it requires you to believe things which are inherently unbelievable on the basis of literally nothing.  Even if that on its own doesn't create another uber-idiot of Glenn Beck quality, or by itself create another villain of Hitler scale, it does prime the brain towards the habit of believing absurd things uncritically.  If believing in the dogma of one religion also means you will buy into new-age fuzzy-wuzzy feel-good nonsense like the Law of Attraction, then it has already brought harm upon you.  If believing that there is a God also means you believe in spirits and the afterlife, then your belief has already damaged you and made you worse off.  A rational course would never dare to accept these sorts of things without solid verifiable evidence.  Sure it may feel good to think that, but if all that mattered was feeling good, then one might as well partake of a variety of psychotropic drugs.  The day that there are real "Law-of-Attraction"-o-meters or spirit detectors or video recordings of the afterlife, then we'll talk.  Until then, it's all in the same realm of nonsensicality as astrology, homeopathy, scientology, and basically anything that has the name Deepak Chopra on the cover.  Any judgments made on the basis of these things are all but guaranteed to be wrong more often than they can ever be right, and even when right, it is already carved in stone that it will be for all the wrong reasons.  To make it even more criminal, it's likely been drilled into you as a child to the point where the scar you carry on your mind is potentially beyond erasure.  And then that wrecked mind begets more wrecked minds.  If indeed you are to believe that children are our future, then what can be said about religion is that it is a mechanism that ensures that that future is completely and utterly screwed in every imaginable way.

Have we not seen over and over that reality does not conform to the delusional?  Why on Earth do we need to consign ourselves to beliefs that the universe was made especially for us?  All that we have learned in the years since the beginnings of civilization, all the advancements of science, technology, medicine, engineering have come about because we worked hard and applied ourselves towards finding out things about the world and the universe around us.  More importantly, this knowledge applies to our world in ways that operate independently of our own personal thoughts, feelings, fears, desires, dreams and so on.  We do not achieve things by praying to the magical sky fairy and wishing that the universe fit our personal longings.  We achieve things by solving the puzzles of the universe and ascertaining the connections between our wishes and the realities of how the world works.  The most important realization one can make is to shed off the ego of garbage religions (as if there were any other kind) and instead of trying to make the universe at large conform to our feelings, make our wishes and hopes fit the universe.  It may not feel good all the time, but for the sake of humanity, it is an absolute necessity.  Don't get hung up on what "feels" right... get hung up on what actually is right.  If you think this is beyond you, then you are giving up before you've even attempted at playing the game of life.  Indulge in your fantasies all you like, but keep your fantasies away from the world.  If you think even that is beyond you, then just stay away from anyone and everyone... especially children.
- பராஷர்