Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Does reading science fiction predispose people to atheism?

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This is an interesting idea that ECM thought of and shared with me in our conversations. I went around the office and tested some of the engineers who were atheists and found that ECM was 100% correct. But let me explain ECM’s thesis in brief.

ECM thinks that science fiction (made-up fantasy stuff) that people read when they are younger causes them to believe that the religion is anti-science and that the progress of science always disproves religion. The stories they read colors their views of science and religion for life, before they ever get to assessing evidence. And that’s why when we produce evidence for them in debates, they will believe in speculations rather than go where the evidence leads. So they believe that maybe unobservable aliens caused the origin of life, and that maybe the untestable multiverse theory explains the fine-tuning of cosmological constants, and that maybe this universe has existed eternally despite the well-supported Big Bang theory which shows that the universe began to exist. Maybe, maybe, maybe. They seem to think that untestable speculations are “good enough” to refute observational evidence – and maybe it’s because of all the science fiction that they’ve read.

Here’s an article in the American Spectator that talks a bit about it. (H/T Denyse O’Leary via ECM)

Excerpt:

A magazine I frequently write for (not this one) recently published a review of a book of essays advocating atheism. The reviewer pointed out with some enthusiasm that a large number of the contributors were science-fiction writers.

This left me somewhat nonplussed. I publish a good deal of science fiction myself, I have also read quite a lot of it, and I am quite unable to see why writing it should be held to particularly qualify anyone to answer the question of whether or not there is a God.

[…]Historically the contribution of the Catholic Church to astronomy was massive and unequalled. Without it astronomy might very well never have grown out of astrology at all. Cathedrals in Bologna, Florence, Paris, Rome and elsewhere were designed in the 17th and 18th centuries to function as solar observatories. Kepler was assisted by a number of Jesuit astronomers, including Father Paul Guldin and Father Zucchi, and by Giovanni Cassini, who had studied under Jesuits. Cassini and Jesuit colleagues were eventually able to confirm Kepler’s theory on the Earth having an elliptical orbit. J.L. Heilbron of the University of California has written:

The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial aid and social support to the study of astronomy over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions.

Science fiction is, by definition, fiction, that is, it deals with things which are the product of a writer’s imagination and are not literally true. In any event, what is and what is not science fiction is hard to define. Simply to say it is about science is meaningless, and while some science-fiction writers are qualified scientists, many are not. Probably even fewer are trained theologians.

Science fiction makes the mysteries of the universe seem easy to an atheist. Everything can be easily explained with fictional future discoveries. Their speculations about aliens, global warming and eternal universes are believed without evidence because atheists want and need to believe in those speculations. In the world of science fiction, the fictional characters can be “moral” and “intelligent” without having to bring God or the evidence for God into the picture. That’s very attractive to an atheist who wants the feeling of being intelligent and moral without having to weight actual scientific evidence or ground their moral values and behavior rationally. The science fiction myths are what atheists want to believe. It’s a placebo at the worldview level. They don’t want cosmic microwave background radiation – they want warp drives. They don’t want chastity – they want holodecks.

Why do people become atheists?

My theory is mainly that atheists adopt atheism because they want pleasure, especially sexual pleasure, without any restraints or guilt. They want to believe that sex without commitment has no consequences, especially a consequence like God judging them for it. Another contributing factor may be that atheists want to be thought of as smart by “the right people” – to sort of blindly accept whatever the “smart people” accept without really searching out reasons or dissenting views. They do this so that they are able to look down at some other group of people so they can feel better about themselves and be part of the right group – without actually having to weigh the evidence on both sides. And lastly, atheism may also be caused by weak fathers or abandoning fathers. But I think that ECM’s science fiction theory has merit, as well. I think that all four of these factors help to explain why atheists believe in a discredited worldview in the teeth of scientific progress.

I wonder if my readers would take some time out to investigate whether their atheist friends have been influenced by reading science fiction and whether they still read it. We really need to get to the bottom of why atheists are so hostile to science, morality, and reason. If we can also find out why they are so desperate to take on the views of people around them because of peer pressure, without caring to hear both sides of questions (e.g. – global warming), that would also be interesting.

Science fiction

Not science fiction

Commentary

Black Republicans offer hope after Barack Obama’s failures on race

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That’s not my headline, that’s the headline on the UK Telegraph article. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Campaigning a few miles from Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired in 1861, Tim Scott described last week how he was born into poverty and a broken home, much like Barack Obama.

“My dad was gone by the time I was seven,” the black candidate for the House of Representatives told a mixed group of students at Fort Dorchester High School in North Charleston. “I was flunking out of high school. I failed geography, civics, Spanish and English. When you fail Spanish and English, you are not bilingual, you are bi-ignorant.”

But the conclusions that Scott, 45, drew were very different from those of Obama. When he was 15, a man who ran a Chick-fil-A fast-food restaurant taught him “that there was a way to think my way out of the worst conditions”. Scott went on to became a small businessman and a proud “conservative Republican”.

Barring a cataclysmic upset, Scott will be elected to Congress on November 2nd. There, he will be a ferocious opponent of Obama, to whom he gives a withering “failing grade” for his presidency.

“Obamacare’s an atrocity around the necks of average Americans,” he told me. “His intentions might be good but he’s leading us towards the brink of bankruptcy. Right now, the American people are simply saying they’ve had enough.”

Scott will be the first black Republican congressman from the Deep South in more than a century. Republicans hope to elect at least two other black candidates to Congress next month. Allen West, in Florida, and Ryan Frazier in Colorado, both with distinguished military records, are in very close races against Democrats.

Allen West and Ryan Frazier are both ex-military men.

Here’ s an ad from Ryan Frazier:

And a clip of Allen West:

And we also have another military woman running for Lt. Governor in Florida – her name is Jennifer Carroll. She’s also a black Republican. We need more people with military backgrounds in office, and more people with private sector backgrounds, too.

Commentary

Barbara Kay writes the best essay against feminism ever written

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Let me introduce the ideology of feminism with a quote from a founder of the feminist movement.

“[A]s long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and the maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed…. No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.” ~ Simone de Beauvoir, “Sex, Society, and the Female Dilemma,” Saturday Review, June 14, 1975.

Here is the greatest essay ever written against feminism – written by Barbara Kay.

Introduction:

The feminism I take exception to today is not the mild and blameless right of a woman to self-actualize that all women absorb by osmosis from the cultural air we breathe, but the radical ideology that has come to dominate the movement’s academic and institutional elites over the last 40 years.

This is an ideology that sees the relations between the sexes as a never-ending antagonistic power struggle, with women as eternal victims and men as eternal oppressors. It is an ideology that explains away the moral failings of women as the fault of a patriarchal “system”, but holds men responsible for their actions. And most important, it is an ideology that shortchanges children by privileging the rights and importance to children of mothers over fathers.

Her first point:

As a result of feminists’ promotion of career equity with men and unrestrained sexual experimentation over early and faithful commitment, women are having fewer children later, and many are having none. Consequently, birthrates are down in all western countries, in many below the replacement levels. Canada’s current fertility rate is 1.54 per woman, behind one-child China’s 1.7.

Sadly, many women realize they want to have children, but too late. They were not warned by their Women’s Studies teachers or by feminist commentators that fertility peaks by age 25, or that late pregnancies carry elevated risks, or that induced abortions pose a risk of pre-term delivery in future pregnancies.

Abortion is now such a commonplace here that it is used as a backup form of birth control. Abortions in Quebec have doubled in the last 10 years: in 1998 16 percent of pregnancies resulted in abortion. Today 30 percent do. You don’t have to be a religious Christian to find that statistic disturbing.

All of these realities are directly traceable to feminist doctrine. Feminists’ original goal may not have been the intention to preside over the actual demographic decline of western civilization. Their goal was to empower women. But as the old saying goes, when you are up to your neck in alligators, it’s difficult to remember that your original intention was to drain the swamp.

Her second point:

Misandry, which is the female equivalent of misogyny (misanthropy is a hatred of humankind), is now entrenched in our public discourse, our education system and social services. Misandry flies beneath most people’s radar, because we have become compliant in the acceptance of theories that have nothing to do with reality, and compliant in the speech codes that accompany that tendency.

Denigration of men in ways both casual and formal are a commonplace in society.

[…]For overt misandry, one has only to survey the industry around domestic violence. You could be forgiven for thinking that domestic violence is a one-way street, for that is certainly the impression one has from the fact that there are innumerable tax-funded shelters for abused women, none for abused men, unlimited funds for campaigns to raise consciousness around abused women, none for abused men. There is not a single social services agency or charity in Canada advertising “family services” that offers counseling, shelter or legal services for men who have been physically abused by women.

Her third point:

I want to talk about the implosion of the traditional family, which can be directly traced to feminism’s repudiation of normative marriage and the role of fathers as vital to a child’s psychological well-being. In June 2006 I wrote about the imbalance, in women’s favour, in the family law system: 90 per cent of contested custody suits end in sole custody awarded to the mother. Such a skewed percentage is unthinkable in any other branch of law.

The family law system is now systemically colonized by radical feminists. Their goal is the incremental legal eclipse of men’s influence over women’s spheres of “identity” interests, which includes children. To that end the custody issue has become a front line in the gender wars, supported by all feminist academics and institutional elites, by supine cabinet ministers and by feminist judges.

Either the majority of women will come to accept her views on feminism… or marriage, and consequently Western civilization, will end.