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"Morton Lucifer" <"95 Theses"@atheist-reformation.org> wrote in message 
news:EXw7o.2937$Yv.406@viwinnwfe01.internal.bigpond.com...
> "An Agnostic Manifesto"
>    By Ron RosenbaumPosted
>    Monday, June 28, 2010, at 2:03 PM ET
>
> "At least we know what we don't know.
>
>
> "Let's get one thing straight: Agnosticism is not some
> kind of weak-tea atheism. Agnosticism is not atheism
> or theism. It is radical skepticism, doubt in the
> possibility of certainty, opposition to the unwarranted
> certainties that atheism and theism offer.
>
> Agnostics have mostly been depicted as doubters of
> religious belief, but recently, with the rise of the
> "New Atheism"�the high-profile denunciations of religion
> in best-sellers from scientists such as Richard Dawkins
> and Daniel Dennett, and polemicists, such as my colleague
> Christopher Hitchens�I believe it's important to define
> a distinct identity for agnosticism, to hold it apart
> from the certitudes of both theism and atheism."
>
>    And this is something which the MAJORITY of non-believers
>    do.. they INSIST on not being associated with, or made
>    equivalent to, atheism, as many atheist dogmatists attempt to do.
>
> "I would not go so far as to argue that there's a
> "new agnosticism" on the rise. But I think it's time
> for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists.
> Indeed agnostics see atheism as "a theism"�as much a
> faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious
> variety."
>
>    Looks like ANOTHER ally for the Atheist Reform Movement
>
> "Faith-based atheism? Yes, alas. Atheists display a
> credulous and childlike faith, worship a certainty as
> yet unsupported by evidence�the certainty that they can
> or will be able to explain how and why the universe came
> into existence. (And some of them can behave as intolerantly
> to heretics who deviate from their unproven orthodoxy as
> the most unbending religious Inquisitor.)"
>
>    Exactly!
>
> "Faced with the fundamental question: "Why is there
> something rather than nothing?" atheists have faith that
> science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider
> that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility
> for something to create itself from nothing. But the
> question presents a fundamental mystery that has bedeviled
> (so to speak) philosophers and theologians from Aristotle
> to Aquinas. Recently scientists have tried to answer it
> with theories of "multiverses" and "vacuums filled with
> quantum potentialities," none of which strikes me as
> persuasive. (For a review of the centrality, and
> insolubility so far, of the something-from-nothing
> question, I recommend this podcast interview with
> Jim Holt, who is writing a book on the subject.)
>
> Having recently spent two weeks in Cambridge (the one
> in the United Kingdom) on a Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship,
> being lectured to by believers and nonbelievers, I found
> myself feeling more than anything unconvinced by certainties
> on either side. And feeling the need for solidarity and
> identity with other doubters. Thus my call for a revivified
>  agnosticism. Our T-shirt will read: I just don't know.
> (I should probably say here that I still consider myself
> Jewish in everything but the believing in God part,
> which, I'll admit, others may take exception to.)
>
> Let me make clear that I accept most of the New Atheist's
> criticism of religious bad behavior over the centuries,
> and of theology itself. I just don't accept turning
> science into a new religion until it can show it has
> all the answers, which it hasn't, and probably never will.
>
>
> Atheists have no evidence�and certainly no proof!�that
> science will ever solve the question of why there
> is something rather than nothing. Just because other
> difficult-seeming problems have been solved does not
> mean all difficult problems will always be solved.
> And so atheists really exist on the same superstitious
> plane as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to prove by logic
> the possibility of creation "ex nihilo" (from nothing).
> His eventual explanation entailed a Supreme Being
> standing outside of time and space somehow endowing
> it with existence (and interfering once in a while)
> without explaining what caused this source of
> "uncaused causation" to be created in the first place.
>
> This is�or should be�grade-school stuff, but many of
> the New Atheists seemed to have stopped thinking since
> their early grade-school science-fair triumphs. I'm
> thinking in particular here of the ones who like to
> call themselves "the brights." (Or have they given up
> on that comically unfortunate term?) The "brights"
> seem like rather dim bulbs when it comes to this
> question. It's amazing how the New Atheists boastfully
> stride over this pons asinorum as if it weren't there.
>
> You know about the pons asinorum, right? The so-called
> "bridge of asses" described by medieval scholars?
> Initially it referred to Euclid's Fifth Theorem, the
> one in which geometry really gets difficult and the
> sheep are separated from the asses among students,
> and the asses can't get across the bridge at all.
> Since then the phrase has been applied to any
> difficult theorem that the asses can't comprehend.
> And when it comes to the question of why is there
> something rather than nothing, the "New Atheists"
> still can't get their asses over the bridge,
> although many of them are too ignorant to realize
> that. This sort of ignorance, a condition called
> "anosognosia," which my friend Errol Morris is
> exploring in depth on his New York Times blog,
> means you don't know what you don't know.
> Or you don't know how stupid you are.
>
> In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to
> send me their answer to the question: "Why is
> there something rather than nothing?" I can't
> wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even
> the evidence that this question ever could be
> answered by science and logic.
>
> Alas, agnostics still suffer from association
> with atheists by theists, and with theists by
> atheists. So let us be more precise about what
> agnostics are and aren't. They aren't disguised
> creationists. In fact, the term agnostic was
> coined in 1869 by one of Darwin's most fervent
> followers, Thomas Henry Huxley, famously known
> as "Darwin's bulldog" for his defense of
> evolutionary theory. Here's how he defined
> his agnosticism:
>
>     This principle may be stated in various
> ways but they all amount to this: that it is
> wrong for a man to say that he is certain of
> the objective truth of any proposition unless
> he can produce evidence which logically
> justifies that certainty.
>
> Huxley originally defined his agnosticism against
> the claims of religion, but it also applies to
> the claims of science in its know-it-all mode.
> I should point out that I accept all that science
> has proven with evidence and falsifiable hypotheses
> but don't believe there is evidence or falsifiable
> certitude that science can prove or disprove everything.
> Agnosticism doesn't contend there are no certainties;
> it simply resists unwarranted untested or untestable
> certainties.
>
> Agnosticism doesn't fear uncertainty. It doesn't cling
> like a child in the dark to the dogmas of orthodox
> religion or atheism. Agnosticism respects and celebrates
> uncertainty and has been doing so since before quantum
> physics revealed the uncertainty that lies at the very
> groundwork of being.
>
> The circumstances in which I found the quotes from
> Huxley are worth noting since they point up the
> undeserving misapprehension of agnosticism as some
> subcomponent of atheism.
>
> I came upon the Huxley essay in a book called The
> Agnostic Reader, a lone nod to agnosticism in an
> entire yardlong shelf of smug New Atheist polemics
> at a local Borders. The book's latest essay dates
> back to 1949. Time for an agnosticism revival, I say.
>
> Why has agnosticism fallen out of favor? New Atheism
> offers the glamour of fraudulent rebelliousness,
> while agnosticism has only the less eye-catching
> attractions of humility. The willingness to say
> "I don't know" is less attention-getting than
> "I know, I know. I know it all."
>
> Humility in the face of mystery has been a recurrent
> theme of mine. I wrote most recently about the
> problem of consciousness and found myself allied
> with the agnostic group of philosophers known as
> the Mysterians, who argue that we are epistemically,
> flat-out unable to know the nature of consciousness
> while being within consciousness. I'm reluctant
> to call agnostics Mysterians, much as I like the
> proto-punk ballad "96 Tears" by ? and the Mysterians.
> But I do like that agnosticism, which in fact can
> be more combative than its image, does have a sort
> of punk, disruptive, troublemaker side.
>
> I was once called a "troublemaker" by no less than
> Terry Eagleton, once the wunderkind neo-Marxist
> post-modernist guru who ruined the minds of several
> generations of comp lit students and who has now
> turned into a promoter of a New Religiosity, with
> books such as Reason, Faith, and Revolution and On Evil.
>
> We had an exchange over a dinner at the Harvard
> Club after he had given a talk there promoting
> his new religiosity, which seemed to me just a
> more mystified version of Aquinas' uncaused causation,
> the Supreme Being standing outside of time and space
> somehow bringing them into being. I asked him over
> dinner what it meant to stand outside time and space
> and how such a Supreme Being got there, and he sought
> refuge in evasive mysticism by asking loftily, "What
> is time?" To which I replied, "You go first."
>
> "Troublemaker," he muttered to the woman sitting
> next to him. Yes, agnostics are troublemakers!
>
> But I was troubled by the lack of intellectual
> ferment in the agnostic world. It's true the
> works of David Berlinski, most recently The Devil's
> Delusion, take on the new atheist science from an
> agnostic point of view. And recently there was a
> stir occasioned by Paul Kurtz, the much-admired
> former editor of the agnostic/atheist publication
> The Skeptical Inquirer who had taken to the pages
> of the secular humanist magazine Free Inquiry to
> attack the "true believer atheists," whom he
> called "true unbelievers" for behaving just
> like religious zealots:
>
>     We need to ask: are there fundamentalist "true
> unbelievers"? Many secular-atheists in twentieth-century
> totalitarian societies were indeed fundamentalists in
> the sense that they sought to impose a strict ideological
> code and willingly used state power and brutal violence
> against anyone who dissented."
>
>   This atheist fundamentalism terrorised, tortured and
>   killed over 70,000,000 people  .. far more than ANY
>   religion!       8^o
>
>
> "Stalinism is the best example of the readiness to punish
> deviation in the name of "the holy secular doctrine," which
> the commissars in the gulags used to enforce obedience.
> Fortunately, the extremes of this form of doctrinal
> terror have declined with the end of the cold war.
>
>     Nonetheless, there still lingers among some true
> unbelievers an unflinching conviction toward atheism�God
> does not exist, period; they are convinced of that!
> This kind of dogmatic attitude holds that this and
> only this is true and that anyone who deviates from
> it is a fool. This insults a great number of
> reflective believers.
>
>     John Dewey, the noted American philosopher,
> observed that "The aggressive atheist seems to have
> something in common with traditional superstition. �
> The exclusive preoccupation of both militant atheism
> and supernaturalism is with man in isolation from
> nature." [A Common Faith]
>
>     B^D   But they just can't see it!
>
> "This argument that some atheists had become "true
> unbelievers" provoked a war of words (both online
> and in print) between atheists and agnostics that
> was valuable in distinguishing the two.
>
> Then the writer John Farrell referred me to the
> agnosticism blog of John Wilkins, an Australian
> thinker, which introduced me to the fact there
> is an ongoing debate between the New Atheists
> and the Newer Agnostics.* When I e-mailed Wilkins
> about what the most important points of contention
> in these debates were, he sent me back this
> provocative five-point response, which I'll
> reprint below with my own annotations:
>
>     "For now my objections to the "New" Atheists
> (who are a vocal subset of the Old Atheists, and
> who I call Affirmative Atheists) are the same as
> my objections to organized religion:
>
>     1. Too much of the rhetoric and sociality is
>        tribal: Us and Them."
>
> So true. The verbal vitriol and vituperation that
> self-proclaimed New Atheists indulge in in the
> comments section of crusading atheist and Selfish
> Gene author Richard Dawkins' blog recently caused
> Dawkins himself, horrified by the not excessively
> "bright" mob he'd created, to shut down his comments
> section. (The concern was attacks on my fellow
> Templeton Cambridge fellow Chris Mooney who is a
> pro-science atheist but not an "incompatibilist,"
> a nonsense term I don't have the patience to explain
> but for which they wanted his blood.)
>
>     2. [The New Atheism] presumes to know what it
>        cannot. More on this below.
>
>     3. As a consequence of 1 and 2, it tries to co-opt
> Agnosticism as a form of "weak" Atheism. I think people
> have the right to self-identify as they choose, and I
> am neither an atheist nor a faith-booster, both charges
> having been made by atheists (sometimes the same atheists).
>
> Cue James Brown chords: Say it loud! We're agnostic
> and proud!
>
>     4. Knowability: We are all atheist about some things:
> Christians are Vishnu-atheists, I am a Thor-atheist, and
> so on. [Which is why the "are you agnostic about fairies?"
> rejoinder is just dumb.] But it is a long step from making
> existence claims about one thing (fairies, Thor) to a general
> denial of the existence of all possible deities. I do not
> think the god of, say John Paul II exists. But I cannot
> speak to the God of Leibniz. No evidence decides that.
>
> Fascinating. He dismisses Catholicism, but he won't deny
> outright the arguments of a philosophical believer such
> as Liebniz. I have been following with interest the argument
> of neo-Leibniz defenders of the existence of God, such as
> Alvin Plantinga, and his critics, such as John Hick.*
>
>     5. But does that mean no *possible* evidence could
> decide it [existence or nonexistence of God]? That's a
> much harder argument to make. Huxley thought it was in
> principle Unknowable, but that's a side effect of too
> much German Romanticism in his tea. I can conceive of
> logically possible states of affairs in which a God is
> knowable, and I can conceive of cases in which it is
> certain that no God exists.
>
> Wilkins' suggestion is that there are really two claims
> agnosticism is concerned with is important: Whether God
> exists or not is one. Whether we can know the answer is
> another. Agnosticism is not for the simple-minded and is
> not as congenial as atheism and theism are.
>
> The courage to admit we don't know and may never know what
> we don't know is more difficult than saying, sure, we know.
>
> As Errol Morris put it in the conclusion of one his epic
> multipart New York Times examination of anosognosia�not
> knowing what we don't know:
>
>     We have "the desire but not the wherewithal to make
> sense of experience. One might easily forsee that this
> would lead to unending unmitigated frustration and suffering.
> But here's where self-deception [and] anosognosia ... step in.
> We wouldn't be able to make sense of anything, but we would
> never be aware of that fact."
>
> Like I said, it's complicated. But the world has suffered
> enough from oversimplifications.
>
> The agnostic moment has come."
>
>
>
>
> -- 
>
>             95 Theses for Atheist Reformation
>
> All belief systems ossify over time.
>
> Jesus taught that Love came before politics and wealth,
> but his church pursued the latter.
>
> Mohammed brought revolutionary rights for women, but his
> followers wound them back in favour of traditional male privilege.
>
> And atheism, once a tiny and ineffectual offshoot of Greek philosophy
> has devolved into a series of dreadful totalitarian tyrannies.
>
> What is required is Reformation.  In religion this is achieved by
> progressive revelation..   the Divine CYCLE of revival and rebirth;
>             Springtime, Summer, Autumn, Winter
>
> In atheism guidance must come from a lesser source;
>
>    The Atheist Reformation Movement    -   ARM
>
> Gentleman,  TO ARMs!
>
>
>      Cry Havoc and Let Slip the Blogs of Reform!
>
> fasgnadh wrote:
>
> # By the time we get to the Enlightenment people understood that
> # a God who stops you from hitting the ground when you fall over,
> # is a puppet master controlling automatons, not the creator
> # of autonomous beings with free will and responsibility.
> #
> # Still the atheists cling to their simplistic caricatures.
> #
> # They even blame the god they claim not to believe in, for NOT
> # STOPPING the mass murders of the atheist holocausts!!!   8^o
> #
> #  http://www.atheistnexus.org/photo/2182797:Photo:10645?context=latest
> #
> # As alt.atheism shows they share the fundamentalists LITERAL reading
> # of the Bible, believing that their ignorant misunderstandings of
> # metaphor shows faults in the text.
> #
> #
> # The fundamentalists are like Philistines staring at the Venus de Milo,
> # and complaining that it is not anatomically correct:
> #
> #    "Where's the ARMS" they wail, to the amusement of Art Historians
> #     and art lovers alike!
>
> Well, I am here to RESTORE the ARMs, and with it, decency and 
> respectability to atheism..
>
> # In the 19th century, Nietzsche Freud and Marx,  all singularly
> # unimpressive individuals, (respectively disturbed, neurotic,
> # and  misogynist) advanced theories rejecting God. And laid
> # the groundwork for the totalitarian horrors of the 20th Century.
> #
> # The worst barbarity occurred in the 'Modern'(sic) Era, when God
> # had been proclaimed Dead in the hearts of man, Religion declared
> # the Opium of the people, and the sexuality of the neurotic Viennese
> # Bourgeois became the central obsession of mankind.
> #
> # Gas chambers and Gulags, millions systematically tortured terrorised
> # and murdered, churches burned, then entire cities, priests killed then
> # entire communities..  the Atheist shitholes were the worst and most
> # miserable, and their peoples could not wait for them to be assigned
> # to the dustbin of FAILED experiments.
> #
> # And yet modern atheists, like modern Nazis, refuse to acknowledge
> # the holocausts carried out by THEIR ideology, in every case where it
> # came to power!    8^o
> #
> #
> #    Atheism needs REFORM.
> #
> #    It has become a haven of Blind Faith and Dogma
> #
> #    Morton Lucifer needs to nail his 95 Theses to the door
> #    of Dawkin's house..  or perhaps to his forehead...!          B^D
> #
> #    and launch the ATHEIST REFORMATION!!!     B^D
>
> I have heard the call of long suffering atheists tired of
> the corruption and violence perpetrated in their name,
> who remember when atheism was a simple personal belief,
> not a violent and repressive political ideology that has
> terrorised, tortured and carried out Mass Murder and Crimes
> against humanity in half the world!
>
>
> I call on all the decent, well meaning atheists to join ARM,
> the Atheist Reformation Movement, and purge it of the rabid
> and dogmatic fanatics which have seized the movement and made
> it anathema to all rational minds and decent folk.
>
> Atheism, if it is to survive, must cease it's historical
> association with Mass Murder, torture, terror, repression,
> anti-theist persecution and pogrom, mass murder and other Crimes
> against Humanity.
>
> It must take stock, become more humble, in accordance with it's
> insignificance, morally, intellectually, socially, numerically,
> culturally, in Science and politically..  it is after all simply
> a belief, unprovable, with no relevance to, or importance to normal life. 
> The Theists have already created rational secular societies
> protecting the freedoms of all.  Atheists must stop being mere whiners,
> and barking mongrel dogs.
>
> Perhaps a vow of silence and retreat to a monastery is in their best
> interests, as befits a tiny, impotent and irrelevant sub-branch of
> Nihilism.
>
> > Atheism is now, in the hands of Dawkins and Hitchins, a populist
> > dogma.  It still tries to wear the mantle of science, aided in this
> > by the (mostly American) Creationist morons, who cannot understand
> > that creation does not unfold according to THEIR understanding,
> >
> >
> > The Big Bang, the fundamental scientific theory of the origin of the
> > Universe, was developed by Monsignor Georges Lema�tre, a Catholic
> > Prelate,  professor of physics and astronomer at the Catholic
> > University of Leuven!
> >
> > Religion is clearly NO IMPEDIMENT to rational science!
> >
> > That title belongs to the Atheist tyrannies, the Union of Savage
> > Slaughter and Repression, Mao's Great Leap Backward and Cultural
> > Devolution, and Pol Pots Year Zero genocide.
> >
> > Not only science, but art, music, culture and all of
> > human society entered a Dark Age during the Atheist tyrannies!
> >
> >
> > Atheism, given the chance, did NOT usher in a new, rational Utopia,
> > but immersed millions in misery and despair.
> >
> > The problem for atheists is, there is not much there to RE FORM!   B^D
>
>
> I will do what I can with what there is.
>
> Even animal dung can be used to daub the walls of peasant huts!  B^)

#
===========
The Dunnoites?
===========
An Agnostic is NOT full of Doubt!
'Tis ONLY God he has query about.
Of Goblins and Fairies,
He's Relaxed and quite Care Free;
But, of God, it's not Yesser nor Noubt.
===========================