Notes from Evil Bender

Pope Ratzi, former Hitler youth, apparently never learned in all his decades of learning that an argument from consequences doesn’t have any relevance to the truth value of a statement:

Pope Benedict, in an encyclical released on Friday, said atheism was responsible for some of the “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice” in history.

Okay, first, let’s go over this again, since so few people seem to get that: even if the above is true, it does not support the existence or non-existence of a supreme being. Second, was it atheism that was responsible for it, or, say, Totalitarian ideology and personal lust for power? Thirdly, if you somehow refuse to see the above problems, you could easily replace “atheism” with “Catholicism” in the above sentence.

Furthermore, it is common for religious folks to say “if I’m wrong, there is no harm, but if you are wrong you will burn in hell forever” or something similar. The second half of this claim has been thoroughly refuted for a long time, but in reading the encyclical, I can’t help but note what it reveals about the first half:

Ambrose had said: “Death is, then, no cause for mourning, for it is the cause of mankind’s salvation.”

11. Whatever precisely Saint Ambrose may have meant by these words, it is true that to eliminate death or to postpone it more or less indefinitely would place the earth and humanity in an impossible situation, and even for the individual would bring no benefit.

So we shouldn’t want to live forever because we’ll have more fun in the afterlife. The logical extension of that argument–that the afterlife is better than the current life–is that those who live shorter lives are blessed. No wonder the Pope is so keen on all those “humans” who are conceived but never emplanted–they’re the winners of life’s lottery.

In a sane world, people who held such a position would never be taken seriously. What a dangerous thing, to postulate that life is toil and death the reward. If Ratzi is wrong, then he is falsely supporting a worldview which steals the joy of living through false hope in the afterlife. How very sad.

I could go on, but all the stuff about atheism is built on the strawman that atheists believe “reason and freedom” will necessarily bring about paradise on earth. Maybe Marx, in the days before Stalin’s purges and two World Wars, believed that, but if there’s any political view that seems to unify present-day atheists it is that any hope for a happy future rests in struggling for it today. Without God to make sure everything works out, we’d better do so ourselves. In truth it is Ratzi who places his hope in an idealistic future that must come: projecting that onto atheists does not an argument make.

[h/t PZ]