Old Polemics Against Atheism

[Osama bin Bambi]

Huh... well, I've been putzing around archive.org for a while now, and I must say that it's hard to tell the difference between the old anti-atheist polemics and the new ones, except that the old ones are generally more verbose. Unfortunately it's also a huge-ass file so I'll see if I can transcribe at least a bit of it here.

http://archive.org/stream/naturalhistoryof00blac#page/36/mode/2up

[Osama bin Bambi]

Okay, here's just the first paragraph.

CHAPTER III.

ATHEISM; ITS SPECIFIC VARIETIES AND COM-
MON ROOT.

"The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God." - Psalms of David.

"Of such doctrine never was there school
But the heart of the fool,
And no man therein Doctor but himself." - Milton.

H[/b]aving in the previous chapter stated, in a few broad lines, the general basis of the theistic creed, I shall now attempt to lay bare the pathology of that most strange disease of the speculative faculty which we call ATHEISM. The history of error is the necessary and most instructive complement of the theory of truth.

And in endeavouring to set forth the causes of this monstrous disease of the reasoning faculty, we shall commence with the simplest conceivable, viz., such absolute feebleness or babyhood of intellect as has not yet reached to the conception of a cause at all. Travellers and anthropological writers tell us of savage tribes whose faculty of discriminating multitude has not reached beyond the number five. Some men, even of well-cultivated minds, but unused to figures, can scarcely perform a simple arithmetical operation without confounding addition and subtraction; and, if so, there may, of course, be creatures so imperfectly emerged from the original monkey-germ of humanity (to speak for a moment with Darwin), and so totally engrossed with putting into some sort of order the multitude of sensuous impressions now being raised into ideas, that the notion of cause has never arisen in their minds. Each individual amongst us remembers a period when curious observation and recognition of individual sensuous impressions formed the sole occupation of budding intellect; and we have only to imagine the growth of the reasoning faculties suddenly stropped in incipient boyhood, in order to realise the notion of a human being incapable of the idea of God. Stunted individuals of all kinds, and stunted races may exist just as trees trying to grow in the Western Hebrides are blasted down to to the stature of gooseberry bushes. Atheists, therefore, wherever they may be the natural product of stunted and half-developed intellect, we shall set down in the lowest stage, and call them Atheists of imbecility. But, as we do not go out of our way to see oak trees not bigger than gooseberry bushes, so we need not detain ourselves with this type of intellectual incapables. It is not Atheists of this class that we are like to meet with in the present age; and if we did meet with them, we should be much more likely to remit them summarily to some hospital of incurables, than to a thinking school where they might be gradually trained up to a comprehension of Leibnitz, and Butler, and Dr. Paley. It is not defect of intellect in ages of civilisation, but perversity, that is the main cause of Atheism.

So, to summarize:
- Darwinism is dumb
- Atheists are like children
- We should treat them like invalids

Okay, got it!

The next type of the atheistic disease which demands notice has its origin not so much in an intellectual feebleness, as in a moral disorder of the reasonable creature. We may have met sometimes in life, or at all events in the columns of newspapers, with persons of a certain irregular, disorderly, distempered habit of mind and life and character correspondent. The career of these people is like a piece of music made up of a constant succession of jars which shakes the strings so much by unkindly vibrations, that the instrument, from the force of an unnatural strain, cracks itself into silence prematurely. Now unharmonized characters of this description are naturally indisposed, and practically incapacitated, from recognising order, design, and system in the constitution of the universe; and of course cannot see God. We find, indeed, always in the world only what we bring with us, a capacity of finding. An ass that delights itself in its own braying, as it is to be presumed all asses do, cannot be expected to find delight in the symphonies of Beethoven; a gambler who has long accustomed to feed his emotional nature on the irrational stimulus afforded by the blind throw of the dice, loses the capacity of extracting pleasure from the normal exercise of reason; and a drunkard who has destroyed the tone of his stomach by the constant irritation of strong liquors, will turn away from the simplicity of Nature's most healthy beverage as from a poison. It could serve no good purpose to parade in these pages flaming examples of the terrible pranks played by disorderly characters in high places, who showed by their whole conduct that they regarded neither God nor man, but delighted in the production of sheer chaos for the triumph of a grossly selfish energy. The biography of Jack Sheppard may be a very profitable study for young thieves, but honest men will furnish the picture galleries of their brain not with such portraits. Nevertheless, it occurs to me to set down here the features of one of the most notable of those disorderly creatures who lived in ancient Rome at the same epoch when the hollow atheism of Epicurus was dressed up for a day in the garb of poetical beauty by a poet of no mean genius called Lucretius. The man I mean is Catiline. Hear how Sallust in a well-known passage describes him: "Lucius Catiline, born of a noble family, a man of great strength, both of mind and body, but of a wicked and perverse disposition. To this man, from his youth upwards, intestine broils, slaughters, rapines, and civil wars were a delight; and in these he put forth all the energy of his youth. He could boast a bodily frame capable of enduring heat and cold, hunger and watching, beyond all belief; he had a spirit daring, cunning, and full of shifts, ready alike to simulate what he was not, and to dissimulate what he was, as occasion might call. Greedy of others' property, hew as lavish of his own; in passion fiery; in words copious; in wisdom scant. His unchastened ambition was constantly desiring things immoderate, incredible, and beyond human reach." This is exactly the sort of character, to whose completeness, if anything like a philosophy is to be attributed, atheism will be that thing. For how can the man who delights in turning the social order into chaos cherish the belief that the world is a physical system, moulded and maintained by a spirit of which the essential function is to create order out of confusion, not the contrary? The man, whoever he be, that sets Rome or Paris on fire, is an atheist, and one of the worst type; he not only denies in a speculative way the fair order of the universe, but he actually employs himself systematically in creating disorder. And what does the Roman historian say about the character of the age which produced this sort of monster? Was it remarkable for religion, for piety? Not at all. Hear the words: "When the Romans, who had grown great by labour and righteousness, at length saw all nations subdued, and the world, both sea and land, at their feet, then Fortune began to rage and to confound all things. That very people, who had found it an easy thing to endure any sort of difficulty and danger, found ease and wealth, a blessing to the wise, the source of misery and ruin. First, greed of money, and then lust of power, grew rampant: here was the fuel which fed the flame of all evils. For the greed of money and the haste to be rich sapped the foundations of all faith, probity, and good morals: instead of the old virtues, the desire of wealth taught men insolence, harshness, the neglect of the gods, and general venality; while the love of power forced many men to be false, having one thing in their breast, and another thing on their tongue: friendships were cultivated, not from genuine love, but from some consideration of external advantage; and men were more anxious to show a fair face than to keep clean a breast."

To summarize,
- Atheists are evil pyromaniacs and anarchists who shit on police cars.
- All people need religion to be moral.
- All immorality stems from atheism.

Yyyyeah, this sounds kinda familiar.

[largeham]

I wonder if this person is a fan of Robespierre?

Also: 'monstrous disease of the reasoning faculty', lol.

Edit: I wonder if coming across Christian anarchists would blow his mind?

[Osama bin Bambi]

No, he basically goes on to say that atheists are simply arrogant and want to usurp god, and in the French Revolution, it was atheists who were responsible for corrupting everyone's thinking with their godless disease and whatnot, making them think they were any better than kings. Which is kind of funny, because Robespierre denounced atheism on numerous occasions, and prior to him becoming a politician he ironically expressed his convictions against the death penalty. IIRC, he actually wanted a state religion of sorts, he just didn't want it to be Catholicism or Christianity. Apparently everyone around him thought he was a kook and wanted nothing to do with his fetish for deism.

But yeah, basically he goes on to say that atheism is at the root for corrupt leaders' thirst for power, because they want to usurp god. Then he goes on to say that democracy and liberty are atheistic ideas because they represent how atheists just want to run around like crazy and shit on police cars and fuck everyone else, because they don't want to admit that kings and rulers are better than they are.

[Distind]

But yeah, basically he goes on to say that atheism is at the root for corrupt leaders' thirst for power, because they want to usurp god.

So he's mistaken atheism for the biblical sin of pride? You know, where people believe in god, and think they could do better. Rather than those of us who don't believe in god because we're reasonably sure that even we could do better than this.

[Osama bin Bambi]

But yeah, basically he goes on to say that atheism is at the root for corrupt leaders' thirst for power, because they want to usurp god.

So he's mistaken atheism for the biblical sin of pride? You know, where people believe in god, and think they could do better. Rather than those of us who don't believe in god because we're reasonably sure that even we could do better than this.

I'm pretty sure he said something about psychological trauma in there too, and something about wall plants.