A blast from this blog’s past

Some of you may have been wondering, even worrying, about what happened to our long-time resident atheist here, “gemli.”  Well, I want to reassure you that he’s still out there.  And, occasionally, he tries to post here.  You don’t see him, but I do (if I choose to look).

You may recall that he grew deeply, deeply tiresome because, after several initial years of politely and not very effectually challenging the consensus here and of being occasionally amusing, his comments increasingly came to consist merely in repeatedly asserting his position.  He refused to read anything, refused to engage, refused to participate in any actual conversation.

I thought that you might want to see that, unfortunately, he hasn’t really changed.  Here’s a comment that he attempted to post here four days ago, in response to the notes that I shared from my reading of Deborah Blum, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (Penguin, 2007):

Does the fact that there are no such things as ghosts have any relevance to this discussion? I like to point out that we’re basically monkeys with slightly larger brains, although I’ve seen the occasional monkey roll its eyes when confronted with the outrageous things that some people believe.

There are about 4,000 different religions in the world, each one distinguished by it’s different beliefs, god count, strictures, rituals, sacred texts and afterlife dispositions, etc., etc. Sure sounds like people just make this stuff up out of thin air. That there isn’t a single solid, confirmable and demonstrable fact of these theological claims should be an indication that all religions are simply made up, period, full stop. The High Priests of every religion are unlikely to question a system that feathers their nests with some pretty fancy feathers, so people are advised to use their own common sense when considering their claims. If they seem too good to be true, well, they probably aren’t.

Most committed theists believe the religion they were brought up in, even though every religion demands belief in different absolute truths. Well, there’s your miracle! No one can argue with that!

Notice that he states his position (“the fact that there are no such things as ghosts”) as if it were established beyond dispute, despite the fact that Ghost Hunters is about, precisely, the quest of William James and his circle — James is universally recognized as one of the foremost minds in American intellectual history — for evidence of human survival of death, a quest in which they felt that they had found positive evidence.  Of course, gemli would never, ever, worlds without end, have lowered himself to cracking the book or considering it.  He invariably, and with wearisome consistency, refused to seriously consider anything that might count against the dogmatic atheism that, he says, he adopted in his early teens.  His reasoning was always essentially as follows:

• gemli: There is no evidence for x.
• would-be interlocutor: Please read A, which provides evidence for x.
• gemli: No.
• would-be interlocutor: Why not?
• gemli:  Because there is no evidence for x.

Notice, too, his invocation of the unarmed themes that he repeated hundreds of times during his prolific active career as a commenter here:

• We’re just monkeys with slightly larger brains, so (except when they coincide with his views) our thoughts about God, meaning, and the universe deserve no credence.
• There are thousands of conflicting views about God, meaning, and the universe, so (excepting his) it’s apparent that they must all be false.
• There is no evidence for any religious claim.  (So, of course, no claimed evidence need ever be considered.)
• Religious leaders are in the game to further their own self-interest.
• People tend to adhere to the religious views in which they were raised (although this doesn’t seem to apply in any relevant way to societies like Sweden and the post-Christian United Kingdom).

And here is the comment that he attempted to post just yesterday:

Religions are strange concoctions. There are about 4,200 of them, each proclaiming to be The One True word of some god or another, none of which actually exist. A con man should be ashamed of himself if he couldn’t take advantage of the desperate gullibility of the rabble. The idea that a slightly more evolved monkey will live forever if it believes in the most abject superstitious nonsense is hard to fathom, but millions of people believe exactly that. Exactly what is believed is more or less irrelevant, because it varies a great deal, depending on the religion. Still, I’d hate to see religions fade away, because when they’re not doing harm, wasting lives and making people bow down to the purported spokesmen for this or that nonsensical faith, they’re endlessly entertaining. It’s just sad to see so many lives lived in the grip of these bogus beliefs. Oh well.

Notice the repeated themes, yet again.  Notice the disdain for religious people (“the desperate gullibility of the rabble”).  Notice, again, the substitution of assertion for reasoning or argument, the replacement of a premise in an argument by the argument’s conclusion (“some god or another, none of which actually exist”) — the very definition of reasoning in a circle.  Note, too, the utter lack of interest in the specifics of the religious views that he choose to come to target (“Exactly what is believed is more or less irrelevant, because it varies a great deal, depending on the religion.”)  What he had picked up as a young teenager in Catholic school has, he has convinced himself, equipped him to declaim with absolute authority on all forms of Christianity (including the Restoration) and, indeed, on each and every variant of theism, worldwide.  Time and again — in his earlier years, when he at least gestured in the direction of interacting with people here — he lodged criticisms against Latter-day Saint beliefs that, in fact, we don’t hold and that he had imagined for us and imputed to us on the basis of his memories of his childhood Catholicism.  Consistently, he refused to read anything, anything, that was suggested to him as a means of informing himself — even when it was brief and available online at no cost.

On multiple occasions, I shared with him specific evidence and full references to materials demonstrating that, whether religion is true or not, religious adherence offers measurable benefits to mental, physical, and social health.  He would never so much as acknowledge the evidence.  And so, here again, as if no challenge had ever been presented to him, he writes of religion “doing harm” and “wasting lives,” of how “sad” it is “to see so many lives [are] lived in the grip of these bogus beliefs.”

Those who are only just now making gemli’s acquaintance may not fully grasp why I grew so tired of his increasingly repetitious comments here — often multiple scores of them per day — but those who attempted conversation with him back in those days will, I think, understand my frustration with him.

Still, I make an offer:  gemli obviously wants to participate here.  If I sense that the sentiment here favors his return, I’ll try to make it happen.  (That doesn’t seem to be as easy as the Disqus instructions say it is, but I’ll make the attempt.)