"The Causes of Atheism"

Originally posted by FreakyKBH
The most famous of the painters, Mike did his part in the sisteenth century.

The Causes of Atheism Written by James Spiegel January, 2010.

"Jones’s fascinating book, Degenerate Moderns, continues Paul Johnson’s line of inquiry into the personal conduct of modern intellectuals. However, Jones does much more to show the connection between the academic theories of the scholars and their sexual perversity specifically. Thus, as indicated in his book’s subtitle, modernism is essentially an attempt to rationalize sexual misbehavior. A case in point is anthropologist Margaret Mead, whose Coming of Age in Samoa was a bestseller when it appeared in 1928. In this study she aimed to undermine moral objectivism, the common sense notion that there are absolute moral values which transcend cultures.

Mead rejected the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic,which she flouted by suggesting that even seemingly natural sexual standards are merely culturally conditioned. After studying the Samoans, she proclaimed that they “scoff at fidelity” and maintain a sexual ethos in which adultery is common but hardly a threat to their social order. Also, according to Mead, “the idea of forceful rape or of any sexual act to which the participants do not give themselves freely is completely foreign to the Samoan mind.” She concluded that Samoans “have no preference for reserving sex activity for important relationships.”

The impact of Mead’s study was significant in Western culture, both in advancing the cultural relativist thesis as well as in reinforcing the social drift toward sexual permissiveness. However, it wasn’t until five decades later that any scholar attempted to test Mead’s study or corroborate her findings. When New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman finally did so, he found that Mead had badly misrepresented Samoan culture and sexual practice. The truth discovered by Freeman was that Samoans had fairly strict sexual standards and strove to abide by Judeo-Christian values in this area.

They regarded adultery as a serious crime, even punishable by death. They highly valued female virginity; even those attempting to seduce virgins were subject to monetary fines. And rape was treated as an egregious crime. How could Mead have erred so wildly in her depiction of Samoan sexual culture? According to Jones and other critics, the answer lies in Mead’s personal values that she read into the data, whether intentionally or not, so as to reinforce her desire for the truth of cultural relativism, a perspective that affords complete sexual license.

Lurking in the background were Mead’s own sexual practices that were anything but Judeo-Christian. As her biographers have confirmed, she was a chronic adulteress and had a decades-long homosexual affair with fellow anthropologist and cultural relativist, Ruth Benedict. Her biographers, along with her personal correspondence with colleagues, reveal how these predilections impacted her research. Thus, writes Jones, “Mead’s anthropological conclusions were drawn primarily from her own personal unresolved sexual conflicts.”

Another twentieth-century figure discussed by Jones is Alfred Kinsey, the famed “sexologist” whose Kinsey Reports profoundly changed Americans’ perceptions and attitudes about human sexuality.These publications and the public discourse they catalyzed helped to lay the social groundwork for the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Originally trained as an entomologist, Kinsey’s interests turned to the study of human sexuality in the middle of his career in the 1930s. Desiring concrete data for analyzing his subject, he began to acquire “sex histories” through interviews, which he eventually supplemented with pornographic materials, including his own homemade films. Today the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University still houses tens of thousands of volumes of pornography and hundreds of pornographic films.

As an evolutionary biologist, Kinsey brought to his sex studies a heavy emphasis on variation, which had a predictable effect on his research methodology. It is one thing to explore a diversity of samples when studying wasps (an early research interest of Kinsey’s). It is quite another to emphasize variety when reputedly seeking to formulate an accurate picture of human sexual practices. Such “variation,” of course, translated into deviancy in Kinsey’s data acquisition. His preferred groups to interview when conducting his sex histories were prostitutes, prisoners, and homosexuals.

And the data they provided maximized variation, thus skewing any account of “normalcy” reported in Kinsey’s books. Or, as Jones expresses it, Kinsey’s special research interests served to “predetermine the results he eventually got.” Like Mead, Kinsey devoutly served the paradigm of moral relativism. In his words, Social forms, legal restrictions, and moral codes may be . . . the codification of human experience; but like all other averages, they are of little significance when applied to particular individuals. . . . Prescriptions are merely public confessions of prescriptionists. . . . What is right for one individual may be wrong for the next; and what is sin and abomination to one may be a worthwhile part of the next individual’s life.

Elsewhere he asserts, “Individual variations shape into a continuous curve on which there are no sharp divisions between normal and abnormal, between right and wrong. ”Kinsey’s conclusion here about the relativity of “right” and “wrong” is not only a blatant non sequitur but it transgresses the boundaries of his field as a social scientist. Reasoning about moral values is the domain of the ethicist, not the scientist. Such statements probably reveal Kinsey’s deeper interests,which have less to do with the empirical fact of variation and more to do with, as Jones would say, rationalizing sexual misbehavior. Perhaps it was this radical relativist mindset that enabled Kinsey to justify his—even by today’s standards—controversial data regarding orgasms in children fromthe ages of fivemonths to fourteen years. Critics note that such research could not be conducted without either sexually abusing children or relying on the dubious testimony of child molesters. This is just one of the many controversies haunting the Kinsey sex research to this day.

As for Kinsey’s own sexual conduct, this remained shrouded in secrecy for many years, but recent biographies have disclosed what reasonable people suspected all along—that Kinsey himself exemplified the sorts of sexual “variations” that he sought to discover in his “scientific” research. Biographers report that Kinsey was bisexual, that he sometimes engaged in masochistic practices, and that he encouraged his graduate students to engage in orgies and other sexual activities.

While Kinsey and his colleagues were working to break down moral and social barriers to sexual deviancy, across the Atlantic another intellectual group had been championing a much broader vision for their sexual rebellion. The famed Bloomsbury group consisted of a wide range of writers and artists who have had a lasting impact on Western culture. Many members of the group, including novelists E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, painter Duncan Grant, economist John Maynard Keynes, and biographer and critic Lytton Strachey were either homosexual or bisexual, and the liaisons between them were multifarious.They saw their sexual practice as part and parcel of their broader moral-aesthetic vision that informed their scholarly and creative works. As Jones puts it, “For Bloomsbury . . . homosexuality and modernism were inextricably intertwined.” Keynes himself sometimes referred to modernism as “The Higher Sodomy.”

As with Mead and Kinsey, the Bloomsbury group recognized that their sexual practices could only be rationalized in terms of a relativistic ethic. Keynes represents the opinion of the group as follows: We entirely repudiated a personal liability on us to obey general rules. We claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits, and the wisdom, experience and self-control to do so successfully. This was a very important part of our faith, violently and aggressively held, and for the outer world it was our most obvious and dangerous characteristic. We repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were, that is to say, in the strict sense of the term, immoralists.

Whether Keynes’s choice of terminology in confessing that Bloomsbury was a collection of “immoralists” is completely sincere or intended as irony, it is nonetheless accurate. Theirs was a remarkable unity of thought and practice, the latter driving the former as much as the other way around. In addition to Mead, Kinsey, and the Bloomsbury Group, E. Michael Jones explores an assortment of other twentieth-century intellectuals, including Pablo Picasso, Sigmund Freud, and Anna Quindlen. In each case, as with the figures discussed in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, we see what might be called an historical psychological confirmation of the Apostle Paul’s thesis in Romans 1:

"God delivers the sexually immoral over to a depraved mind. Jones sums it up well: “Sexual sins are corrupting. . . . The most insidious corruption brought about by sexual sin, however, is the corruption of the mind. One moves all too easily from sexual sins, which are probably the most common to mankind, to intellectual sins, which are the most pernicious.” (3 of 4)

https://www.apologetics.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=469:the-causes-of-atheism&catid=96:bonus-content&Itemid=80

Originally posted by Grampy Bobby
Do you find the label atheist or theist on birth certificates?

Originally posted by Grampy Bobby
One day brain waves will cease; the body experiences physical death. Then what happens to googlefudge?

Originally posted by Grampy Bobby
"Everyone's born without a belief in the existence of planets."
... or the existence of intellectual fulfillment or the joys of marital sex or the rules governing how chess pieces move: these empirical and rational experiences and decisions regarding choices are still future. Why presume to label any category?

Why the urgent imperative to slap a label on an infant which only knows the difference between comfort and discomfort?

Edit Note: If the cultural norms include labeling infants at birth, might as well also assign third parties to make vocational predeterminations: "Cynthia will become a successful brain surgeon; James will work at odd jobs for minimum wage."

GB: Suzi, I do appreciate your sense of risk in delving into a minor aspect of the topic which you tried to keep in conversational bounds (though the collective will chose to segue from "The Causes of Atheism" to an anatomical/human sexuality detour).

D64: Everyone's born as an atheist, without a belief in the existence of God(s). Every theist had to learn one's beliefs from someone else.

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