Today was the second (and thus last) club day of the term. As you might guess, we get some interesting (and not so interesting) questions at the AAFW booth. Four questions/comments made over the past two days struck me as noteworthy:
What is a Freethinker?
I suspect we are asked this question so often because people are offended by the term "freethinker" appearing beside "atheist" and "agnostic". I can understand that, and while looking up definitions of freethinker I found a very good essay explaining the relation between freethought and theism.
Unfortunately, many of the people ask this question because they are looking for a fight. Others just tacitly assume they know what the term freethinker means and make silly nonsensical comments.
What happens when you die?
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
-Epicurus
I was sort of surprised when I was asked this question. Am I supposed to be an expert on this? Usually it is the religious people who claim to know what happens when you die. Honestly, I've never died, so I can't tell you.
I would assume, though, that it's just like when you lose consciousness due to a relatively normal event (i.e. sleep or getting hit on the head), or that it is just like before you were born. A change in the brain (through substances, physical damage or severing parts of it) cause changes of the same magnitude in the mind, so it makes sense that when you destroy the brain you destroy the mind.
"It's interesting that you have an Einstein quote on your board. I mean, he was a genius, but he was a devout Christian."
I was aghast at this statement. Not only is so far from being right, but the speaker put it forward so authoritatively that he was clearly just trying to bullshit me into thinking he actually knew something about Einstein.
Ignorance about a topic is fine - I am ignorant about a great number of things and will readily admit it. But it amazed me that this person was trying to pass themselves off as knowledgeable about something they clearly knew nothing about. If he had been a little bit wrong (i.e. if he just said that Einstein believed in a personal god) or hadn't said it with so much confidence (i.e. "Oh, wasn't Einstein a Christian?"), it would have been a little silly but nothing major. But no, this guy was very confident and very wrong.
First of all, Einstein was never Christian. He was an ethnic Jew, but was not raised religiously. He was never a member of any religion, let alone a devout one.
He did speak of "God", by which he meant Spinoza's God, which is an impersonal god much unlike the god of any religion (it wouldn't make sense praying to Spinoza's God - it is somewhat synonymous with the natural laws of the universe). Now, I could see someone getting confused and thinking that when Einstein spoke of "God" he meant a personal one, but to be so mistaken as to say that Einstein was a devout Christian is just absurd and perhaps shows that the speaker has a major bias towards the Christian faith. A couple of relevant Einstein quotes:
"It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere."
[in response to claims about him worshipping the Judeo-Christian god] "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."
I haven't really made up my mind about this stuff yet, but I've decided on two possibilities, neither of which I like very much. One is that there is no god and there is no rational reason for caring about anything. Otherwise, there is a god who we fundamentally can't understand who says what matters, and since he is the creator of everything, if he says something matters, it really does
I've tried to do as much justice to this quote as I could, though I can't remember it exactly. The speaker was unable to articulate why it was that we should care about what a creator says we should care about, so I think the speaker sort of felt the need to have a sort of purpose/meaning handed down from up high someplace.
I found it very odd that the speaker felt a need to have a rational basis for having cares. I think it is just an observation - I (and anyone who moved a muscle at some point today) care about things. If I could come up with a rational reason why I shouldn't, and it was in my power to change the things I care about, then perhaps we would have an argument against caring about things. We sometimes do have rational reasons for giving up caring about some things - but this is always because it is the rational thing to do given that we have something else we care about which is affected by our caring about something else. I don't know how you could possibly construct such an argument without appealing to other cares.
The people who don't care about things (or don't care much) are people suffering from clinical depression.
Of course, sometimes a better way of explaining things is through webcomics (click to enlarge):
