It's All Good Fun Until Someone's Existence Gets Poked Out

Alternate title: Atheists Running With Scissors.

I was fortunate enough to have pleasant conversations today with a pair of atheists on Twitter. One of them, @Keira_Hudson, provided me with a couple of lovely insights into the whole thing and for that I am deeply grateful. Here's the trio of exchanges.

@Keira_Hudson How about free will? It requires uncertainty which has been squeezed out of existence by chemistry and physics.
— K T Cat (@ktcat) March 7, 2014

@Keira_Hudson Can you please help - "I think freely" + "I don't accept free will" is a contradiction
— K T Cat (@ktcat) March 7, 2014

@Keira_Hudson Without free will, you can't think freely at all. You're a machine. Work through the logic.
— K T Cat (@ktcat) March 7, 2014

Earlier, she had posted this one:

@ktcat After analysing the history of religion and the scientific side of the universe I simply cannot accept the existence of a deity.
— Keira Hudson (@Keira_Hudson) March 7, 2014

Atheism is weakest where it thinks itself strong. It's all Logic! and Science! while bashing the ignorant, superstitious peasants, but it can't bear to use the logic and science too far. That would be icky. Or, rather, "inky" as in the inky blackness of the abyss. Keira turned me on to what looks to be an utterly ghastly piece of Sam Harris cynicism -

wherein old Sammy tells the semi-educated rubes who pay his speaking fees and shell out good money to buy his trash that Science! says they don't have free will, but somehow, it all works out for the best in the end because Morals! This review sums it up pretty well.

At about 10 minutes after noon yesterday, an ineluctable series of causal events that no doubt began before the dawn of humanity compelled me to sit for an hour in a Barnes and Noble reading this predetermined collection of words from someone whose parents had been programmed to name him Sam Harris. I regret that this is the way I ended up spending an hour, though of course it's useless to regret what one could not help but do, and, moreover, the "I" that I imagine I am is just along for the ride anyway.

So in the end, Sam Harris makes money telling you that you were going to buy his book anyway, but that you shouldn't be afraid of the meaninglessness of your existence because Easter Bunny.

The second atheist, the kindly and well-meaning @mickskeptic, taught me that atheism is just a subset of Catholicism. That is, all I needed to do was to turn off my faith in God and, voila!, I could employ all of the arguments available to Mickey. The difference is that for me, it's like wearing virtual reality goggles that make it look like I'm on the ledge of a 37th floor window, looking down on a busy street. For Mickey, he really is looking down on that street. I can pretend to take that leap - the final step of logic which reveals that nothing has any meaning at all - and when I hit the bottom, I bounce back and run upstairs to try it again. For Mickey, the results are less sanguine.

Like I said, atheism is weakest where it thinks itself strong. Atheists know, to varying degrees, that the last step is out there, but they all think they can postpone or avoid the conclusion by coming up with logic pretzels more convoluted than the worst of the medieval monks debating angels and heads of pins.

What I've learned from Twitter: Lousy atheists go immediately to sex insults. Mediocre atheists, which is to say almost all of them, still believe in free will, apparently because no one has ever challenged them on it. Good atheists don't believe in free will, but cling to some belief in their own existence. Top notch atheists, none of whom I've met, probably listen to Gorgoroth all day and don't waste their time emitting vibrations at other bags of molecules.



Atoms can be forced to do fun things because they obey rules all the time!
You're nothing but atoms, right?