That is quite a feat.

It is usually safer to call yourself an agnostic- which implies you are still searching but are not convinced yet, but are open to the posibiliy since there are things which yet remain and perhaps will forever remain unknown to any one single human being to warrant such a definitive declaration.

Perhaps I misunderstood what yur definition of Atheist is. Would you care to explain?

Miguel

Excellently said.

But D’Souza took Dawkins way out of context - and I believe you misunderstand some of what he says as well. Randomness as applied to macro systems is something even religious Cosmologists accept. I think D’Souza was minimalizing Dawkins arguments and trying to squeeze them into too narrow a focus.

Besides, Dawkins, as you may know, says many things simply to provoke discussion - a not uncommon tactic among those who advance unpopular or controversial positions.

Wonder Woman:

Nice to see you back and blogging. Honored to be in the Justice League. Send me a link and I’ll blogroll ya.

Take as much time as you need.

God is the one and only self-caused fact in the universe. He is the secret of the order, plan, and purpose of the whole creation of things and beings. The everywhere-changing universe is regulated and stabilized by absolutely unchanging laws, the habits of an unchanging God. The fact of God, the divine law, is changeless; the truth of God, his relation to the universe, is a relative revelation which is ever adaptable to the constantly evolving universe.

Those who would invent a religion without God are like those who would gather fruit without trees, have children without parents. You cannot have effects without causes; only the I AM is causeless. The fact of religious experience implies God, and such a God of personal experience must be a personal Deity. You cannot pray to a chemical formula, supplicate a mathematical equation, worship a hypothesis, confide in a postulate, commune with a process, serve an abstraction, or hold loving fellowship with a law.

True, many apparently religious traits can grow out of nonreligious roots. Man can, intellectually, deny God and yet be morally good, loyal, filial, honest, and even idealistic. Man may graft many purely humanistic branches onto his basic spiritual nature and thus apparently prove his contentions in behalf of a godless religion, but such an experience is devoid of survival values, God-knowingness and God-ascension. In such a mortal experience only social fruits are forthcoming, not spiritual. The graft determines the nature of the fruit, notwithstanding that the living sustenance is drawn from the roots of original divine endowment of both mind and spirit.

The intellectual earmark of religion is certainty; the philosophical characteristic is consistency; the social fruits are love and service.

The God-knowing individual is not one who is blind to the difficulties or unmindful of the obstacles which stand in the way of finding God in the maze of superstition, tradition, and materialistic tendencies of modern times. He has encountered all these deterrents and triumphed over them, surmounted them by living faith, and attained the highlands of spiritual experience in spite of them. But it is true that many who are inwardly sure about God fear to assert such feelings of certainty because of the multiplicity and cleverness of those who assemble objections and magnify difficulties about believing in God. It requires no great depth of intellect to pick flaws, ask questions, or raise objections. But it does require brilliance of mind to answer these questions and solve these difficulties; faith certainty is the greatest technique for dealing with all such superficial contentions.

Page 1127 If science, philosophy, or sociology dares to become dogmatic in contending with the prophets of true religion, then should God-knowing men reply to such unwarranted dogmatism with that more farseeing dogmatism of the certainty of personal spiritual experience, “I know what I have experienced because I am a son of I AM.” If the personal experience of a faither is to be challenged by dogma, then this faith-born son of the experiencible Father may reply with that unchallengeable dogma, the statement of his actual sonship with the Universal Father.

Only an unqualified reality, an absolute, could dare consistently to be dogmatic. Those who assume to be dogmatic must, if consistent, sooner or later be driven into the arms of the Absolute of energy, the Universal of truth, and the Infinite of love.

If the nonreligious approaches to cosmic reality presume to challenge the certainty of faith on the grounds of its unproved status, then the spirit experiencer can likewise resort to the dogmatic challenge of the facts of science and the beliefs of philosophy on the grounds that they are likewise unproved; they are likewise experiences in the consciousness of the scientist or the philosopher.

Of God, the most inescapable of all presences, the most real of all facts, the most living of all truths, the most loving of all friends, and the most divine of all values, we have the right to be the most certain of all universe experiences.

I have had this argument myself, many times.

Many continually express the false perception that atheism boils down to a belief in human beings as a puddle of chemicals that think, and the universe being some colossal accident.

I have yet to meet a single real atheist who sees things this way. Most have expressed to me, a belief that reason and order are universal absolutes (in place of the deist’s belief in God as the absolute). Every action is positive or negative, and every action elicits a positive or negative consequence. The fact that this equation is evidenced daily, in our interactions with each other, proves it is not an accidental occurrence, but rather a fundamental law of causation.

What many deists don’t realize is that there are really 2 camps on the non-deist side. One is atheism — like you and I. We know and understand the theory around religion, and respect the tenets it teaches and those who follow them. We agree on the concept of right and wrong, and merely disagree on how the conclusions are arrived at.

The second camp however, is comprised of what I like to call God-haters. Dinesh D’Souza (and many others) makes the mistake of lumping them in with real atheists. But an atheist does not believe in the existence of God, making the hatred of God and religion, an irreconcilable contradiction. God-haters don’t just hate God and religion, they hate humanity and anything that celebrates it — God is just the main casualty of this destructive tendency.

The reason many deists vilify atheists this way, is because they haven’t determined this simple separation. After all, The Children of God evoked the presence of an almighty and used similar terms to that of fundamentalist Christianity, but most Christians would balk at being lumped together with them, under one theological banner.

Crikey, that comment got long, fast. Sorry Rick…this is an argument I just hate having with people who should know better.

If nothing exists except matter in motion, then evil doesn’t exist.
Evil does exist.
Therefore, it is not the case that everything is just matter in motion.

D’Souza is banking on the fact that most of us accept the second premise, i.e., most of us are moral realists in one sense or another. The first premise is prima facie plausible: if nothing exists except matter in motion, it’s difficult to see how some material events could be called “evil” and others “good,” other than in some emotive sense. That’s not to say that it is impossible to reconcile moral realism and Dawkins-style atheism, but it’s a hard road to hoe. The upshot is that Dawkins-style atheism is more compatible with moral nihilism; hence if you reject moral nihilism, you’re likely to reject Dawkins-style atheism. Again, there’s room for critique here, but there’s no grounds for the abuse that people are heaping on D’Souza.

I should have clarified:

“Instinct” meaning the urge to live in large, diverse groups and innate recognition that some strictures are necessary for that to be possible.