Atheist Commentaries Dates Listed Below

I decided to create this because I didnt feel it was proper to shove all of my writings and musings on
atheism into post-notes on my Presidential Vacation allegory. For example, the very first commentary I
added here is a reference to that writing, but I dont think it is necessary to have read it first before
understanding what I am getting at.

(6/16/2014) Who is the President?
I asked this to someone I was chatting with last night, as I played the role of a Socratic Atheist. I
said that I wasnt challenging their belief in faith, but rather, I was asking, when they replied they
believed in Jesus Christ, how they knew the name of the God that they were receiving images of. They
didnt seem to understand what I was saying at first, so I had to set the scene. Imagine you awaken in a
village, you dont know where it is. Someone is taking care of you, and someone brings in some
provisions and says to you, The president delivered these to help you. And I respond, Thanks,
Obama. Am I truthful in responding in this way?
The person I was speaking with said, Well, it depends on where you are and what president
they are meaning. Exactly! Even if I am sure that the gift actually came from the president - I dont - I
still wouldnt know enough to be able to suppose this fellows name. And suppose none of the people in
this village have ever met the President or really know much about him at all. They may guess his name,
but how can they know for sure? Going back to the case of God, I asked her why she didnt believe in
Zeus, or Allah, or Ra, or Odin. She just simply stated that it was a matter of faith and her experience
with Jesus. Which, of course, doesnt satisfactorily answer the question. When I asked her if it was
beyond logic, she said that it was.
Now, deviating from the conversation I had last night a bit, I started to think about the
Christians who still believe non-believers will be punished. Thankfully, their numbers are dwindling, but
they are still around. Some of them will grant that those before Christianity was invented will still be
saved, since they couldnt have possibly known the truth. Some of them think that retarded people will
be saved, since they are incapable of thinking things through themselves. Some people think that very
young unbaptized babies will still be saved, because they are still innocent. So, I wonder if I cant
register for an exception myself with God.
The argument would go a little something like this: I may have a disability. It seems that while
others speak of this faculty called faith, I, like some Asperger sufferer encountering emotions, am
incapable of understanding what is meant by this. To me, it even seems the advocates of faith tend to
get things wrong in alarming numbers. Just look at their lack of consensus. Some of the so-called
experts of faith are Muslims, others are Christians, some are Buddhists or Hindus, and some even just
follow Astrology or some independent spiritualism. So, I feel that even if I possessed this ability, like
these people do, that I would still get the answer wrong. However, I prefer logic, and I honestly want to
know the truth. Therefore, if one of the gods is the truth, and my logic fails to get me there, at least I
can claim good intentions. I can tell God that I wanted to possess the correct faith, but it was a disability
that was never cured. I can tell God that I didnt want to attempt faith, in case I wasnt good at it, and
end up following some Charlatan or false deity. Didnt Eve take the snakes word on faith? Didnt Adam
take Eves word on faith? Where did their faith get them? It seems there are very few actual experts in
faith even among its advocates, so what hope do I have in getting it right by taking that deceptive path?
If I close my eyes and leap, I could land among the devil just as easily as I could land among the holy. It
seems that I am left only with my eyes to see, so that God needs to guide me while my eyes are open,
lest I take the hand of the devil by mistake.
(6/17/2014) Addition to the above on Faith
Every crazy person who murdered someone, because God told him to, did it on faith. It doesn't
matter whether God actually told him to or not, because if he denied that it was God talking to him, that
would be questioning his faith, would it not? And if you insist that rare instances like this are one of the
few times that you should question your faith (though Im not sure how and where you would draw that
line), does this mean that you think Abraham should have questioned his instead of taking it as far as he
did?

(6/25/2014) Is vs Ought, Atrocities of Atheism VS Religion
It may be true that some atheist regimes committed some horrible atrocities. Though, I think
this is somewhat of an equivocation, since technically Buddhists are also atheists, so if a Buddhist ever
killed someone could we attribute it to an atheist? So, on the other side we have state worshippers who
are also classified as atheists. I think we need a new sect name for atheists that are rational and dont
worship anything in particular or put their faith in beings outside of themselves.
However, this aside, Im not sure you can blame atheism intrinsically on these murders. When it
comes to religious books, they tell you what you ought to do. You should rape and pillage certain
villages. You should put apostates to death. You should look down on homosexuals. But science only
tells you what is the case. It is the case that those more fit are more likely to survive. It doesnt tell
you that you ought to put those who are born weak down (as state worshipping atheism was prone to
do) nor does it tell you that you ought to invent medicine and technology to keep them fit for modern
society (as rational atheists are prone to do). There are no immoral commandments in the rational
atheist books. Darwin never wrote what should be done in the name of evolution or atheism, he merely
told people what the case was. Rational atheism tells you to think for yourself, and to come to develop
your own logical moral conclusions. State atheism and the religions of the world commanded people
commit immoral actions.

(6/26/2014) Euthyphro Dilemma Proves Sam Harris Correct?
So, I was watching a debate between William Lane Craig and Sam Harris about the objectivity of
morals without God. William Lane Craig said that you need God as a foundation for moral objectivity.
However, the Euthyphro Problem asks us if the moral is moral because God subjectively says it is (the
might of God makes right) or if God likes the moral because it is objectively moral. If it is the former,
then the will of God is still subjective, and his moral commands are up to the whims of God, and thus
objective morality doesnt exist whether God does or not. However, if God likes the moral because
what is moral exists independent of himself, then that would mean that it would remain moral whether
he existed or not, and therefore Sam Harris would be proven correct.

(7/29/2014) Metaphor to show that Evolution isnt Extreme Random Chance
Ive been trying to find a metaphor - because I love metaphors for explaining things to show
that Evolution isnt simply a matter of extreme luck like a Boeing 747 being put together by a tornado.
Ive seen someone on Youtube explain it once as a lottery ticket where only one number was handled at
a time and the winning numbers were locked into place, but without the video it was hard to explain
(even here Im sure it sounds confusing). So, it finally hit me what metaphor would be good to explain it
with.
First, I thought of the metaphor of video game save states. However, this is very niche. Even
people that consider themselves gamers probably wouldnt get this metaphor, but I will use it here
anyway, before moving onto my more general metaphor. If you ever use an emulated system
(hardware) and run a rom (software/game) on it, there is usually a tool that lets you save the game
anywhere you would like to regardless of the system built into the game. The result is that you can save
the game after any trivial success you manage. Jump across a platform? Save it. Beat a small enemy
without taking any damage? Save it. These might not seem tough handled individually, but taking the
gauntlet of pits and enemies that accumulate over a level tends to usually result in a few deaths or at
least health that is zapped too low to handle the final boss. However, using save states, even the worst
video game player can probably beat the game, and whats more, he could probably beat the game
much faster than a decent veteran gamer could. If he falls into a pit, he can instantly reload next to the
pit instead of restarting the course all the way over. You can take pot shots at the boss, reloading every
time he hits you, and saving every time you hit him. This is exactly how evolution works, but I will
explain that more in-depth after the next, and more general, metaphor.
Okay, so that metaphor wont be understood by many people without that lengthy description I
gave above. So, the next thing that popped into my head was the chimps writing Shakespeare. Then I
realized, if this system was applied to the chimps, they would probably have Shakespeare written in a
week or so. Imagine that the chimps are pounding away at the keyboard, except that anytime they hit
an incorrect key they are immediately told they made an error and told to try again, except instead of
starting completely over, they just start right before they made the mistake. For example, they are
typing the word sunset and they type sunb. The screen would immediately erase the b and the
word sun would be left, and they would keep smashing buttons until they hit s. This is just like
evolution, because every adaptation an animal makes must either be beneficial or at least not be
harmful to it (in its current environment, which explains why all animals dont all evolve at the same
time [why monkeys still exists and so does man]). The moment natural selection makes a bad choice,
that animal is immediately killed off. With modern medicine and human empathy, this may not be the
case for mankind today, but just imagine a quadriplegic or a retard in the wild world of Thomas Hobbes.
So, if nature makes a poor choice, we dont start back from scratch, but we start back from the animal
that was surviving up until that mutation, and mutations are continually applied to that animal until that
animal is even more fit for its environment.
For something more tangible, Ive also seen this method applied to practice tests for school
exams. In one of my Excel classes, the practice test would allow you to keep clicking on anything until
you found the right answer, meaning there was no punishment for choosing the wrong answer. In other
words, the wrong answer wasnt accepted, but it also didnt punish your score. This allowed you to
eventually complete the practice test while having answering every question 100% accurately. There
was no random chance to worry about, because it wasnt saved. Only the correct answers were saved.
This is how order arises out of chaos.