***SPOILER ALERT***

Pan’s Labyrinth begins with the arrival of twelve-year-old Ofelia and her mother at the camp of Captain Vidal, Ofelia’s mother Carmen’s new husband. We’re in Spain, 1944, and Franco and his fascists have won the Civil War. Carmen is pregnant, while Ofelia retreats into fairy tales.

Captain Vidal, as it turns out, puts his ideals above all else, or else he’s just a plain sadist, effectually illustrated in a scene where a father and a son, suspected to be rebels, are captured in the woods at night. The father claims they’re hunting rabbits. The son says that if his father says so, it must be true. Vidal responds by crushing the face of the son, and when the father complains, he kills him too. Then they open the bag the two men had with them, and find a dead rabbit.

As you can gather, Pan’s Labyrinth is not a fairytale for children.

Ofelia, who believes in the fairytales she reads in her books, is visited one night by a fairy, who leads her into a labyrinth in the woods. There, she meets a faun. In the English title, he’s named Pan, after the Greek god. Even though Guillermo del Toro, the director, has said that the faun isn’t meant to be Pan, the analogy is apt. You can already read some religious commentary into the story: Pan’s appearance, part goat, may very well have inspired the Christian conception of Satan.

You see, Pan’s Labyrinth really starts with a kind of prologue, a fairy tale Ofelia reads in the car that takes her with her mother out to Vidal’s lair in the woods. The fairytale takes place in the Underworld, where people are immortal and there is no suffering. This can obviously be taken as an analogy for the afterlife or Paradise. Princess Moanna, however, is not satisfied with her life in paradise; she becomes curious about the over-world, sneaks out and, abandoning the underworld and immortality, dies. Kind of a reference to the Judeo-Christian Fall, if you like. But her soul lives on. And that soul, says the faun, is Ofelia.

She will return to the underworld, but she must first complete three tasks before Full Moon, to prove that her soul has not been tainted and become mortal. The faun gives Ofelia a book that will tell her what she must do, and instructs her to read it alone.

You can see lots of religious themes here: there’s the underworld, a world free of mortality and suffering; yet the people there are not satisfied, or Moanna/Ofelia wouldn’t have left in the first place. She sneaks out of the underworld because she’s curious: this curiousity is mirrored in the biblical tale of Adam and Eve, where the forbidden fruit brings knowledge. Ignorance is bliss, indeed.

Parallel to the fantasy, there’s gritty reality. Vidal tortures for the sake of the cause, fascism. “Remember, we are not here willingly,” says one character at a dinner in the house at Vidal’s lair. That’s wrong, says Vidal. The rebels are wrong in thinking we are all equals, he says, because we are the winners and they lost. Spain must be pure, and if that required killing every single rebel, that is what Vidal intends to do. Therefore, they are there willingly.

Ofelia gets to know Mercedes, the housekeeper-boss-type at Vidal’s lair. As it turns out, her brother is in the resistance, and she, too, fights Vidal and the fascists by leaking information, supplying the rebels and so on. Her accomplice is Vidal’s Doctor, who’s tasked with making sure Carmen, Ofelia’s pregnant mother and Vidal’s wife, lives to deliver her baby; the pregnancy has caused illness. But make no mistake, Vidal is not overly sentimental: if it comes to it, he instructs the doctor, choose the boy (for Vidal is certain the child is a boy) before the mother.

Guillermo de Torro was asked to direct the Narnia movie, but turned it down, instead focusing on Pan’s Labyrinth. Where Narnia’s religious themes are obvious and intruding, Pan’s Labyrinth, in my opinion, does not stoop to this level. The moral and religious symbolism is there and integral to the whole yet doesn’t distract from the rest of it, and you can watch Pan’s Labyrinth as a straightforward portrayal of the Spanish Civil War or as a straightforward fantasy in line with Alice in Wonderland, and in both instances get something from it without having to deal with the symbolism that underlies it.

Ofelia’s first task isn’t very interesting, but the second has more action and deeper symbolism. She is instructed to obtain a dagger from the lair of the Pale Man, a creature without eyes in the face, pale as described, with his eyes lying in front of his hands, sitting motionless in front of a large feast. Again we can, if we want to, choose either to see the scene as straightforward fantasy/action or as deeper symbolism. The faun instructs Ofelia not to eat anything at the feast. This is temptation again, obviously. She doesn’t resist, but succumbs to some urge and eats some grapes. This, of course, awakens the Pale Man, who eats two of the fairies, then chases her. She escapes narrowly from his cave, which is decorated with pictures of the Pale Man sending people to Hell, but when the faun hears of her disobedience he refuses to help her or even let her do the final task.

If you’d like to, you can even read into the movie a commentary on the whole divide between fantasy and science, the real and the unreal. The faun gives Ofelia a mandrake root to put under her mother’s sickbed. When she does this, her mother’s state miraculously betters. But Vidal discovers the plant and demands to know what it is. Carmen takes it, and when Ofelia says it’s a magic plant she got from a faun, her mother throws it to the fire and screams, “There is no magic! Not for you, not for me, not for anyone! When you grow older you’ll see!” The semi-conscious plant writhes in agony in the fire, screams and squeals, then dies. With its death, Ofelia’s mother gets contractions, and soon Carmen is dead, her last act in life being delivering her baby. Rationalism has won over irrational superstition, and in so doing, has killed Ofelia’s mother.

Later, the faun agrees to let Ofelia have a second chance. The final task, which she must promise to obey without questions, is to bring her baby brother, just delivered into this world when his mother dies, to the titular labyrinth.

Meanwhile, Vidal is busy interrogating Mercedes; finally, after capturing one of the rebels, he has gathered that there is a leak, a spy, and identified her. But Mercedes is not, as in many a religious story, a weak woman. She severs Vidal with a knife and runs away to the woods. She is soon surrounded by Vidal’s riders, but her brother and the rest of the rebels
come in time to save her.

The injured Vidal, upon discovering Ofelia with his child, his son, the one that’s supposed to grow up in a pure España, chases her to the Labyrinth. This provides the climax. The faun has the dagger Ofelia got from the Pale Man in his hand and demands her brother. Blood from an innocent is the final task. But Ofelia would rather give up immortality than spill her innocent brother’s blood. So the faun retreats, and Vidal arrives to take her brother and shoot her.

But in forsaking Paradise, in denying to pay the price for eternal life, she has gained it; she’s suddenly in her father’s palace, and the faun tells her that this was the most important task, one that she by failing fulfilled. But Ofelia is dead, yet immortal; or is she just dead, dying with an irrational belief that is really untrue? We can speculate.

I’m not sure I agree with all the film says, or perhaps (probably) it can be interpreted in many different ways, but whatever I think of it, I cannot deny its beauty. The movie is gorgeous; the Academy Award for best cinematography is well earned.

There’s not much new in way of either plot or symbolics. The fantasy part is straightforward, the kind of story I would be immediately turned off by if it were a novel in the store. The Civil War story, too, is not particularly original. But the film succeeds in combining them, in executing the old in a new, near-perfect way. The cinematography is beautiful, the characters are good, the plot coherent, the symbolics rich, as seen by my attempts to interpret them in this review.

So, in summary, watch this movie. It can be seen if you want to analyze it to death, just enjoy it or immerse yourself in it. The symbolic meanings don’t get in the way. To speak the truth, I don’t normally interpret movies this heavily. Therein lies the beauty: in writing this review from a perspective appropriate for de-Conversion, I’ve only given it one spin; another viewer could give it quite another, and both would be equally correct or incorrect.

Or, as I’ve said, you could watch it just for the entertainment.

- Simen
(originally published on 29 Aug 2007)

I’d like to direct you to a Wikipedia entry entitled List of problems solved by MacGyver. It argues my point very well. Here is perhaps the single longest Wikipedia page I have seen, and it’s written about the extraordinary feats of a fictional character in a TV show. By the way, who are these people who write mile long wiki entries on fiction? Could they be, say, enthusiasts?

As surely as there are stamp collectors and amateur writers, there are hobby philosophers. There are people who like to think about whether God exists or not; not because they have a spiritual crisis; not because they feel the need for the crutch of faith; not because the devil tricked them into denying the obvious truth of Gospel; not because the Flying Spaghetti Demon whispered to them in a dream “Go forth and make the heathens numerous!”; but simply because they find the question intrinsically interesting. That could be the reason for all the discussions on belief.

That is my reason.

Now, most of the people on this blog, as fits a blog about de-conversion, are de-converts, and so they may have other reasons for thinking about this. They may live in societies that demand a justification for nonbelief but not for belief. Whereas, I live in a society that is largely the opposite. They may find the consequences of irrational faith on them, as exhibited by society, unbearable. But still, there is nothing keeping them from simply not discussing faith and the lack of faith online.

So my diagnosis is this: they are hobby philosophers, the whole bunch. That is why. Now that you know, I hope you will never feel the need again to discredit an atheist by saying, “Oh, surely you can’t really be all that disbelieving when you obsess so much about God?” Because no one denies that the MacGyver enthusiasts who put together that wiki page know MacGyver isn’t real, right?

- Simen

I’m not going to open that particular can of worms again. Rather, let’s take a step back and consider what a good reason to reject a belief system would look like.

Every religion is a body of different belief systems. There’s ethical teachings, mythology, cosmology, biology, philosophy, all jammed together from a time when there was no real separation between the various branches of science, the various branches of philosophy and religion. We all have some kind of attitude to these systems. And here comes the crucial point: there is no neutral belief system. Every belief system, so long as its body of beliefs is halfway coherent, will include an implicit claim to the opposite of opposing belief systems.

Consider a Christian who believes that Jesus is the Son of God, and God is the creator and ultimate moral legislator of the universe. Implicit in this person’s belief system lies the claim that Jesus is not not the Son of God, and God isn’t not the creator and ultimate moral legislator. If our hypotethical Christian is to maintain a coherent worldview, she must also deny all beliefs that contradict hers.

Flat Earthers implicitly claim that the world is not spheroid in shape. Muslims implicitly claim that Jesus is not the Son of God. So do atheists, and so on.

This is what everyone with a coherent worldview does. We reject views that contradict our views. It’s not coherent to believe that Jesus is both the Son of God and not the Son of God. Since everyone does it, and it seems impossible to form a coherent worldview that doesn’t, what’s so wrong with it? And what is it, really, that we’re doing here? What did I just point out?

It’s the fact that, despite not having read every single religious scripture in the world, despite not having read The End of Faith or The God Delusion, everyone rejects contradictory views. Even those who study religion for a living haven’t read all religious scriptures ever to have existed. Every single one of them, no matter how well-read and informed they are, have an implicit claim in their belief system to the opposite of any view contradicting their views.

It seems, then, that if we believe something, it’s not only reasonable to reject the opposite, it is the only option if we want to remain coherent and rational.

It also seems that those who said I cannot reject the Christian god without having read the entire Christian canon are hypocrites, because every single one of them rejects a whole bunch of other scriptures as false, without having read a single sentence of them.

So what is a good reason to reject a belief as untrue, or at least as unsupported and unreasonable?

- Simen

That doesn’t mean it’s God behind the covers, of course. Here’s an article that provides another blow to that elusive gap-god (paper).

Now, an international team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organised into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself (…)

Quite bizarrely, not only do these helical strands interact in a counterintuitive way in which like can attract like, but they also undergo changes that are normally associated with biological molecules, such as DNA and proteins, say the researchers. They can, for instance, divide, or bifurcate, to form two copies of the original structure. These new structures can also interact to induce changes in their neighbours and they can even evolve into yet more structures as less stable ones break down, leaving behind only the fittest structures in the plasma (…)

So, could helical clusters formed from interstellar dust be somehow alive? “These complex, self-organized plasma structures exhibit all the necessary properties to qualify them as candidates for inorganic living matter,” says Tsytovich, “they are autonomous, they reproduce and they evolve.”

So, God of the Gaps, we’ve started filling one of your permanent places of residence. I suggest you move to a more uncertain area of knowledge, such as consciousness, or preferrably annihilate altogether.

- Simen

Reactions are varied, of course: a televangelist condemned her as being a demon from Hell; a range of people condemned her as a fraud and for immorally profitting from people’s spiritual needs (some of them hypocritically looking the other way when they, as employees of the State Church, do the same); a lot of people demanded that she withdraw her membership in Den Norske Kirke, the State Church; the Princess herself thinks that, had she lived some hundred years past, she would’ve been burned as a witch; and a lot of people, including Crown Princess Mette-Marit, spoke out in her defence.

As an atheist, this fight between religions is both amusing and depressing. In my eyes, Christianity and New Age-style healing, miracles, contact with angels and the like are all contestants on the same, irrational game field. Undeniably the man who stands in a pile of shit (or in this case, in a pile of irrational reasoning) sounds odd when he cries “Foul!” when catching the scent of a fellow equally submerged in stinky matter.

Are Christianity and New Ageism—in this case represented by alleged healing, reading and contact with angels—compatible? Could one coherently combine the two? I’m attempted to simply shrug it off by saying that both systems are incoherent in themselves, and those inconsistencies will not go away if you look at their product, but I’ve decided not to be quite so smug.

Angels certainly appear in the Bible. Jesus certainly does miracles in the Bible. But what are “readings” and “healings”, anyway? The website of Astarte Education, the real name of the “angel school”, has a helpful FAQ. They explain reading thus:

If someone tells you a story, your inner eye allows you to see all the people and the landscapes described in the tale. A reading is an extension of this way of seeing, but instead of obtaining the pictures from a story, you get them from another person. When we give a reading we use our fellow beings as mirrors. This means that the more insight we gain into another person, the greater the opportunity to work with ourselves and similar challenges in our own lives. With the help of the angels we can potentially release old habits, blockages, fears, cords etc., both within the other person and within ourselves. This may free us to act on our own impulses instead of in response to other people’s ingrained patterns and fears that we have always thought were our own.

I don’t remember ever reading or hearing of anything like this in Christian scripture, but I’ll admit that I’m not the most well-read theologian or biblical scholar (that’s possibly the understatement of the year: I’ve expressed the view that theology is the study of theologians’ imaginations, and I’m no kind of scholar at all). I’ll leave my usual opiniated writing hanging here and admit ignorance. Perhaps commenters have some real gems here. Might this be the contradiction of Christian mythology theology?

What’s healing, then? Awfully vaguely described, by the very same FAQ, it is this:

In essence, everything from the medicines that cure our illnesses to divine miracles involves healing. We at ASTARTE EDUCATION give you tools so that you may have the possibility of achieving balance in your body and the energies which it contains so that it can function at its maximum potential every day. Here, again, the angels will potentially help us.

So healing could be everything, really, that involves the improvement of health. I’ll applaud them on a nicer exit strategy than George W. Bush in case someone might criticize their efforts (say by demanding empirical evidence): surely no one would deny that there exist medicines that cure illnesses?

I think the Princess or whoever wrote the FAQ would make a nice politician, so easily slipping away from nasty questions by appearing to answer without really answering at all, but aside from that, I don’t feel I have a greater understanding of just what healing is.

I can’t see that divine miracles or medicine contradicts any usual understanding of Christianity; perhaps it’s the idea that angels can be called on a whim that enrages some Christians so? Or is it the idea of making money on what is holy (then how account for preachers of all flavors that make a living on their employment with some Church)? I don’t know.

Rather than conclude much on my own, I’ll open some questions: Does New Age religion like described above contradict Christianity? Whatever does healing really mean? And are Christians really entitled to criticize New Ageists for being ridiculous and irrational, given their own beliefs?

Tune in to the comment field for (hopefully) the answers to these and more questions, and possibly some ridicule of this article’s author.

- Simen

The Agnostic/Atheist is attempting to explain religion through empirical methods while Theists attempt the same by using theology. The mixing of these concepts into the other field is a clear injustice to both disciplines.

But is this really true? Is it true that theology sits on the primary, or even exclusive rights to say something about religion and gods? I happen to think that this is false; in fact, I think theology is little more than the rational analysis of theologians’ imaginations. Since theologians often have a rather good imagination, I will in this post use my imagination. For completeness, I’ve written about this before, but what I will say now isn’t exactly the same.

Imagine that I believe that the Moon is made of cheese. Now, being naturally curious, I start thinking about the implications of having a satellite made of cheese for Earth, and what current observations can tell us about the type of cheese that the Moon is made of, and countless other issues that a moon made of cheese would raise. After some time, I come to the conclusion that not only the Moon, but all other celestial bodies are made of cheese. Then I start publishing my investigations into the heavenly bodies and the material they’re made of. Only, I don’t publish my papers through the usual scientific means; instead, I found a whole new field, which I call Astronomical Cheesology.

Other believers start joining me, and pretty soon, a niche community based around the new, astonishing insight that all celestial bodies are made of cheese is thriving. Papers are going to and fro about the consistency of Saturn’s moon Titan’s outer layer of cheese, the origin of the hot cheese of the Sun and other such esoteric topics. Pretty soon, I have gained a noble following and quite a reputation, and I start appearing on TV shows and writing books on Astronomical Cheesology. When serious scientists tell me that there is no way that the Moon is made of cheese, because we have observed that it is not and besides a mechanism to allow the Moon to be a cheese would provide a radically different universe, I reply that while scientists attempt to say something about the Moon through empirical means, I attempt to do the same with Astronomical Cheesology, and the mixing of these concepts into the other field is a clear injustice to both.

This is the state theology is in today. Two thousand years ago, perhaps Astronomical Cheesology could have been quite the smash hit, but today it’s so obvious that such a field is built on a false foundation that no one would believe it. Theology, on the other hand, has had thousands of years to grow a following, and believers will still try to claim that it has some noble foundation that neither science nor traditional philosophy has, and thus has the exclusive rights to say something about gods.

The trouble, here, is that theology just like Astronomical Cheesology is built on a false foundation, and the method for discovering new things in theology must to a large degree depend either on pure imagination or on the interpretation of holy books. To make Astronomical Cheesology analogous, imagine I, as the founder of the field, wrote a book called Astronomical Cheesology: a New Foundation for Astronomy. Then Astronomical Cheesologists would divide their time evenly between interpreting the Foundation and conjecturing based on pure imagination.

If the Cheesologists had used empirical methods, two unpleasant things would happen: first, they would cross into scientific territory, thereby giving up the exclusivity they had worked so hard to attain; second, had they bothered to look, they would have been forced to admit that there is absolutely nothing that indicates that the celestial bodies are made of cheese, and there is plenty of evidence that suggests they’re not. The same thing happens with theologians: if they had used empirical methods, they would have to let science in the door, and they would also be forced to admit that little suggests that there is a god, and much suggests that there isn’t. In fact, supporters of theology as a valid field of study separated from philosophy and science, such as Justin in the quote above, admit that theology isn’t about empirical study: the Agnostic/Atheist is attempting to explain religion through empirical methods while Theists attempt the same by using theology.

What tools are left to study God, then, if not empirical methods? Theologians seem to divide their efforts remarkably close to the Astronomical Cheesologists: some study and interpret scripture, while others use their imaginations and conjure up purely hypothetical scenarios. Unlike mainstream philosophers, the self-appointed investigators in holy matters assert that they have some insights into hypothetical scenarios that hold true in reality, but nonetheless is outside of the reach of science.

This post has taken the form of a reductio ad absurdum: if the theologian is justified in saying that science cannot say anything about religion, then the Astronomical Cheesologist is also justified in saying that science cannot say anything about celestial bodies made of cheese. Both theologians and Cheesologists try to establish a premise that is very much about the empirical world, namely that there is a personal god that acts in the world and that celestial bodies are made of cheese, respectively. Both then try to claim that to mix science into these matters is an injustice to both fields.

A popular form of the argument Justin used in the quote above is called Non-overlapping Magisteria (NOMA). NOMA attempts to establish that science and (religion, theology, take your pick) are equally valid, non-overlapping fields of study: both have something important to say, but one cannot say anything about the field of the other. Stephen Jay Gould intended NOMA to resolve the supposed conflict between religion and science. He describes the principle: “the magisterium of science covers the empirical realm: what the Universe is made of (fact) and why does it work in this way (theory). The magisterium of religion extends over questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. These two magisteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry (consider, for example, the magisterium of art and the meaning of beauty).” This is essentially the same idea that Justin expressed in the quote at the top of this blog post.

But consider the idea of God. It says that there is a personal, intelligent being outside of space and time, that deliberately designed the universe and everything in it and to this day continues to work inside it. Is this not about “what the universe is made of and why it works in this way”? Isn’t the question, “does this supernatural intelligence exist?” something else entirely than “ultimate meaning and moral value”? In fact, religion says something about both the empirical world and the philosophical ideas of meaning and moral value. No theistic religion limits itself to questions of ultimate meaning and moral value. All theistic religions assert the existence of this personal, active supernatural entity. No theistic religion can withstand to go outside of its magisterium (Gould defines magisterium as “a domain where one form of teaching holds the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution”).

It seems, then, that NOMA is a kind of double standard, a kind of hypocrisy, because its proponents demand that science stands by without saying a word as religion comes thundering out of its allotted magisterium and makes claims inside of science’s. The only way of consistently holding that science cannot say anything about religious matters is to say that religious matters are not empirical matters; gods cannot ever be part of the empirical world. In other words, only atheists can consistently claim NOMA. Seems like the poster boy of many theists is really just another argument for atheism.

Another criticism that can be made about both Justin’s view and NOMA is that the magisterium handed over to religion is really already occupied. Questions of ultimate meaning and moral value are really philosophical questions, and philosophers have been mulling over them since before the birth of Christianity. It seems that religion is not really needed: it spans over two magisteria (science and philosophy) that are both perfectly well occupied to begin with. Who would have thought that the very argument designed to make space for religion and resolve its conflict with science could be used to show that religion is obsolete?

The day theology becomes a valid field of study, I will begin writing my dissertation on Astronomical Cheesology (note: I here separate study of the Bible and general philosophy from theology).

Update: I’m closing this discussion off, both because it has moved far from the original topic and, more importantly, because I’m going away and won’t be able to respond.

- Simen

1. Jesus was lying and knew it, so he was a liar.
2. Jesus was lying but believed what he was saying, so he was a lunatic.
3. Jesus was telling the truth, so he was divine.

Thus, according to Lewis, Jesus could only be a great moral teacher if he was telling the truth and was the son of God. Later, this argument was used as a logical proof that Jesus was in fact the son of God.

• Point 1 couldn’t be true, or so the argument goes, because then Jesus wouldn’t be willing to die for it.
• Point 2 couldn’t be true, because Jesus for some reason couldn’t be a lunatic.
• Therefore, the logical conclusion is that Jesus was divine.

The point was raised in the comments to one of my blog entries on my Import Mind.Reason blog that there may be a fourth option – Jesus never claimed to be the son of God but that the early Christians misunderstood this or decided it for themselves. The Gospels were written long after Jesus lived. In fact, the first was written forty years after his death. This is a significant period of time to allow for the stories to change slightly during a time period when technology was much less advanced than today. The fact that many elements of Christianity were also found in other contemporary religions suggests that early Christians borrowed from other traditions. It is difficult to discern exactly what applies to Jesus the myth or what applies to Jesus the man.

However, even if we accept the premise that Jesus claimed he was divine, the Lewis arguments are not solid. I agree that if Jesus did not believe in what he taught, and he did indeed teach that he was the son of God, then he would not have given his life for it. However, point 2 above is much more problematic. I have yet to hear a compelling argument that Jesus could not have been what Lewis calls a lunatic.

Martyrdom is a weak argument for a cause. If people are willing to die for it, it must be true, right? Wrong. In 1997, the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide. 38 followers and the leader himself killed themselves so that they could take a ride with a spaceship they believed was hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet. Needless to say, the comet didn’t hide any spaceships and the members died in vain.

Why couldn’t Jesus have been under the (wrong) impression that he was divine? He would be far from the first, nor the last prophet charismatic enough to convince people he was not mentally ill and still claim the most fantastic things. The leader of the UFO sect mentioned above managed to convince 38 people that he was not some lunatic with a tin-foil hat, but rather a prophet who knew about the arrival of a spaceship. He is among many others who have convinced people to believe obvious falsehoods.

In fact, I would argue that the Gospels themselves are not very accurate. Of course, this is a view all atheists must take because the Gospels contains many passages about miracles we believe never happened. In fact, I’d argue that any text on miracles should be looked on as less reliable than a text with no miracles, simply by virtue of the fact that they contain miracles. Through the years, there have been numerous accounts of miracles, but never has any one of those claims stood up to skeptical inquiry. Never has there been any evidence suggesting that these events could not have happened by natural causes or that they were altogether fake. Given this simple, empirical observation, that no purported miracle has ever been proven to be genuine, we should be careful to trust sources that tell about such miracles.

In a comment to the previously mentioned blog entry, Husky said:

If Jesus was only one of tens of thousands of Jesuses living in Palestine at the time, and if there were multiple other prophets as well, then why did Christianity flourish with time and the rest of them fade away? I feel the burden of proof lies with the atheists on this one. There must be some objective aspect of Christianity that allowed it to succeed. Or it must be conceded that Christianity’s rise to prominence was a highly, HIGHLY improbable development.

I can’t say how many Jesuses there were in Palestine at the time of Jesus, but he was certainly not the only prophet in the area at the time.

Christianity’s rise was mostly a result of luck. Emperor Constantine I legalized Christianity by granting religious freedom. He also did much to prevent the old custom of worshiping the emperor, and held the First Council of Nicaea that helped settle disputes internal to the religion. Before this, Christians had been prosecuted and executed for their religious beliefs. After Constantine, Christianity grew from being allowed to being favored, and from then on it spread rapidly. It seems likely that without Constantine a combination of internal and external factors would have led to Christianity to be much more obscure than it is today.

Unlike scientific ideas that generally become accepted once sufficient evidence for them is presented, religious ideas are much more dependent on social factors. No religion can provide objective evidence in favor of their position, so asking what objective ideas particular to Christianity that provided it with an advantage is missing the mark a bit. Rather, the popularity of any particular religion seems to be mostly based on luck and how good communicators the originators are. That Christianity would become the largest religion in the world is an improbable development given the weak arguments to support its claims.

- Simen

You see, Hewhay is a fan of science fiction. He has constructed two kinds of Virtual Reality helmets. Every time someone dies, he’s gonna strap their souls in one of the two kinds of helmets. One helmet will eternally simulate your worst nightmares. The other will construct a virtual reality wherein all your wildest dreams come true. There’s no mercy: once you’re wearing a helmet, there’s no way it’s coming off for the rest of eternity.

Hewhay will punish Christians by strapping their souls to nightmare helmets. If you believe in any other god or no god at all, he’ll put you in a dream helmet.

It appears that your best move is to not believe in the Christian god. If you don’t and Hewhay exists, he’ll put you in the dream helmet. If you do and Hewhay exists, he’ll punish you with eternal nightmares. If Hewhay doesn’t exist, nothing happens, because we’re only concerned with one god. Here’s a helpful table:

The “don’t believe in Yahweh” column adds up to positive infinity, whereas the “believe in Yahweh” column adds up to minus infinity. The choice is easy, right? It’s obviously advantageous to “bet” on Hewhay existing. Therefore, you shouldn’t believe in the Christian god.

Does this sound familiar? It’s a bet in the spirit of Blaise Pascal’s famous wager, which attempts to argue that you’re better off believing in the Christian god than not, regardless of actual existence. Although largely deprecated by philosophers, this kind of reasoning is still in use among lay Christians. Yet I just turned it on its head and got the exact opposite result. What’s wrong here?

Diagnosing Pascal’s Wager

There’s a multitude of problems with Pascal’s wager. For one, it completely disregards other gods. Remember, the wager attempts to establish an advantage purely with mathematical means. It doesn’t take into account evidential status; instead, it tries to show that no matter what you do, believing at worst gives a neutral result and at best an infinite positive result, whereas disbelieving will at best give a neutral result and at worst result in eternal suffering. The wager fails to take into account the majority of options: it only considers the existence or non-existence of the Christian god, ignoring Hewhay, Allah, Buddha, Brahma, Thor, Zeus and all other gods. Pascal’s wager presents us with a two-dimensional slice of the infinite-dimensional object we’d need to represent all possibilities, including the infinite number of potential gods. Even so, the users of the wager pretend that this tiny subspace is in fact the whole space.

Another thing with Pascal’s wager is that it makes assumptions about life on earth and the afterlife it can’t support. If you’re a regular reader, you’ve read some of my fellow bloggers’ stories, and heard the examples of their lives actually becoming better after they deconverted. Clearly, the one-sided picture the wager presents, where disbelieving always gives a neutral result, is false. Another thing is that, just as there is an infinite space of possible gods, there is an infinite space of possible afterlifes. There could be Heaven and Hell, like in Christian mythology, or you could add in Purgatory, like in some brands of Christianity, or Nightmare VR Helmet and Dreams-Come-True VR Helmet like in Hewhayian mythology, or no afterlife at all, or an infinite number of other possibilities. Since the wager, again, doesn’t consider evidential status, and since it’s per definition impossible for living humans to experience the afterlife anyway, this is an unsupportable assumption and an unforgivable mistake in reasoning.

There are more holes in Pascal’s Wager. It assumes that you, by seeing the statistical advantages of believing, can either make yourself genuinely believe (i.e., you can consciously convince yourself to believe), or fool an omniscient being into believing your belief is genuine. Neither of these things seem to hold true in general. Normal humans cannot by willpower alone convince themselves to believe something they don’t. Instead, they would have to rely on self-delusion and drugs and probably make themselves mentally ill to delude themselves into believing if they were convinced not to. And if they instead of the hard route fake belief, by observing religious rituals without believing them to be true, they’re presuming that an omniscient being who per definition knows everything doesn’t know that they’re faking it. If anything, they’d be more likely to end up in Hell.

Another fault is that the wager without justification assumes the likelihoods of the Christian god existing and not existing are equal, so that we can disregard probabilities of existence when discussing possible outcomes. Once again, we’re presented only part of the picture as if it were all there is to it.

This diagnosis is hard to set, but there’s no doubt that something’s wrong. There’s so much wrong, so many symptoms that no single disease (read: fallacy or catchphrase) covers them all. But one thing is clear: using the wager as a support for your faith is inexcusable from an intellectual viewpoint.

- Simen

How can you criticize something you have never read?

This objection is based on the following quote:

I will admit that I haven’t read the entire Bible. Does this mean I cannot be critical of Christianity? Does the fact that I haven’t read the Koran mean I cannot be critical of Islam? Absolutely not! I don’t believe them. The basic premise of these books is that they are of divine nature. They’re built on the assumption that they are inspired by or directly delivered from God, creator and all.

This admittedly looks rather strange without context, possibly even in context, because you can’t read my mind and find out what I really meant. I was not trying to defend the rather indefensible position “It’s OK to criticize something you don’t know anything about”. I do know something about both the Bible and the Koran. I know very well the important stories in the Bible, and I know well the assumption that underlies both Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other monotheistic religions: there is a single creator who is still active in the world. Further, this God is usually given the powers omnipotence and omniscience, possibly even omnibenevolence.

I feel confident to reject the foundations of all these monotheistic religions because of lack of evidence.

I should also note that theists, by virtue of following one religion, automatically reject all other religions, and I would guess that no one has read the major works on every religion. It seems we all do it: we reject religions based on their foundations rather than based on thorough reading of their holy texts. Christians will reject all religions not based on the Christian god. Atheists will reject all religions based on a god.

Just because some believers use circular reasoning doesn’t mean all believers are wrong

True. I wasn’t trying to prove all believers wrong. I was simply pointing out a common flaw.

Little bonus factoid: there’s actually an apologetic tradition called presuppositionalism that is entirely based on circular reasoning. It tries to show that one must assume God in order to use logic, science, morality, or some other highly useful method, and that it therefore would be absurd not to assume God exists.

You have concluded without experiment that the Bible or some other holy book is untrue – that’s not very scientific, is it?

On the contrary, it is a basic scientific and logical principle that we assume something is wrong. The burden of proof lies on the positive claim, and in science, one sets out to disprove a hypothesis, only verifying it by showing that one is unable to falsify it.

It stands to reason that the Bible, or rather those who claim it to be true, has the burden of proof on proving it. I’m entirely justified in reading religious texts with a skeptical attitude. If it makes you feel any better, that’s what I do with other nonfiction texts too.

You seem awfully determined on discrediting religion; did you have a bad experience, or what?

I can’t name any particular experience that made me an atheist, and neither can I name any experience that has led me to write about religion and lack thereof on the internet. I’m not bitter, because I never was much more than a cultural Christian anyway.

I am, as I like to think others are, concerned with finding the truth. If that means rejecting all religions, I will reject all religions.

You will notice that I don’t write much about Greek or Norse mythology. It has to do with the fact that (1) no one believes them and (2) even if there were some believers, they would have had zero influence on society. Now the situation with Christianity or Islam is quite different: they’re widely held to be true (taken together, half the world’s population believe in Islam or Christianity), and decisions that have to do with the real world are based on them.

Besides, I like discussing eternal questions. There comes a point when the discussion gets so clouded with fallacies and anger and fundamentalism that all the fun is gone. After one such moment, I wrote the post about circular reasoning.

You are rude and/or a fundamentalist

I’m sorry you feel that way. If you’d be so kind as to provide examples, I’d be grateful.

Also, I think you have a peculiar definition of fundamentalism.

God is love, your criticisms are irrelevant

There are a billion different interpretations of scripture. I can’t say which one is most valid, and I don’t think anyone else can either. What I do know is that it would be rather silly to call oneself a Christian if one didn’t believe in the Christian god and the key events: crurifixion, resurrection and so on.

As someone in the comments said (Pollyanna?), Christianity is a package deal. Yes, I believe in love, though it doesn’t make me a Christian.

You should allow people to have whatever faith they want

This is an atheism/skepticism blog. It would be rather silly not to expect some writings on the topic. You, having gone to the active step of visiting this blog, should expect to see your faith challenged.

Unlike the impression you might get, I’m usually pretty casual about my nonbelief. I rarely if ever discuss religion in real life. If I do, it’s usually because someone else brought it up. I don’t approach people on the street and tell them about atheism, I don’t vandalize churches, I don’t harass Christians.

I do however think that when a discussion warrants it, attacking religions is fair. If you argue that gay marriages shouldn’t be allowed because the Bible describes it as sin, I’m well within my rights to attack the Bible’s moral and historical authority. People can have what faith they want, but when it’s relevant in a discussion, it’s fair to discuss it.

I have previously criticized Dawkins, Harris and their intellectual comrades for being a bit too active in their religious critiques; I find some of their critiques to be irrelevant. Still, I agree with much they say, in particular that religions shouldn’t be artificially sealed from criticism. The question is simply, when is it relevant? I’d say it’s definitively relevant on de-conversion.com, but maybe that’s just me.

The Bible was written so long ago that we’d be hard-pressed to find other sources; therefore, you should accept the Bible as validating itself

If the events in the Bible cannot be verified with outside sources, the Bible’s authencity is in serious trouble, because those events are too damn extraordinary not to leave some mark on the world outside of religious scripture.

Genesis and the resurrection (or other important biblical events) were one-off events; they’re not reproducable, so we can’t scientifically investigate them

I guess all the scientists who work on the beginning of the universe, our planet and life would be pissed to hear that their work isn’t scientific.

The Big Bang is the ultimate one-off event, happening only once in the lifetime of a universe. Still, that’s the model scientists have stuck to for forty years. If you’re interested in why, you can check out the evidence over at talk.origins.

What I’m saying is that this is a poor excuse. We’d expect these events to have consequences, just like BB or the beginning of life, and we’d expect to be able to find them.

Science cannot say anything about areas that require faith

It depends: are you admitting that the only way to justify a belief in God is faith, or are you saying that science cannot discuss religious claims? If the latter, you’re in the area of NOMA (Non-overlapping magisteria), which claims that religion and science are equally valid, non-overlapping methods to explain non-overlapping fields of interest.

Unfortunately, an active god is bound to leave some mark on the world. If you still want to claim NOMA, you must either admit that God isn’t doing anything in the world (i.e., you are a deist) and consequently that you have no reason to believe, or you must take the agnostic position, which means you’re basically saying “all we can ever know about God is that God is unknowable”. That severely handicaps religions, because they tend to say a lot about God.

NOMA and its flaws is a topic for another blog post. If you really can’t wait, I’ve written about it before, on my personal, now-discontinued blog.

Science/atheism is just another religion

No, they’re not. They don’t fulfill any of the criteria. There are no systems of ethics, no teachings, no gods, no beliefs, no anything. Atheism is a position on a single question, and science is a method for finding out things in the world.

OK, so they’re not, but you certainly have a religious attitude towards them

I don’t think I have any absolute knowledge. I do however think science is the best approximation for knowledge about the physical world.

None of what you say is as novel or insightful as you seem to think

I’m far from the only one to notice these patterns in religious thought, nor have I claimed to be. All thinkers, great or small, stand on the shoulders of those who came before them.

The comments are more insightful than the essay

Well, that’s great. The comments wouldn’t have been there if I didn’t write the post in the first place, no would they?

I agree completely, but you’re not radical enough; Christians are stupid/incapable of rational thought/uncreative/something like that

You are wrong. Generalizing over two billion people in that way is beyond stupid.

If I’ve missed anything here, feel free to ask in the comments. Now that the worst storm has gone, hopefully the comment field won’t be so cluttered that it becomes impossible to keep track.

- Simen