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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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 Posted: Sat May 26, 2007 7:13 pm Post subject: God Is Not Great |
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There are four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.
I do not think it is arrogant of me to claim that I had already discovered these four objections (as well as noticed the more vulgar and obvious fact that religion is used by those in temporal charge to invest themselves with authority) before my boyish voice had broken. I am morally certain that millions of other people came to very similar conclusions in very much the same way, and I have since met such people in hundreds of places, and in dozens of different countries. Many of them never believed, and many of them abandoned faith after a difficult struggle. Some of them had blinding moments of un-conviction that were every bit as instantaneous, though perhaps less epileptic and apocalyptic (and later more rationally and more morally justified) than Saul of Tarsus on the Damascene road. And here is the point, about myself and my co-thinkers. Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: the disagreement between Professor Stephen Jay Gould and Professor Richard Dawkins, concerning "punctuated evolution" and the unfilled gaps in post-Darwinian theory, is quite wide as well as quite deep, but we shall resolve it by evidence and reasoning and not by mutual excommunication. (My own annoyance at Professor Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, for their cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called "brights," is a part of a continuous argument.) We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and�since there is no other metaphor�also the soul. We do not believe in heaven or hell, yet no statistic will ever find that without these blandishments and threats we commit more crimes of greed or violence than the faithful. (In fact, if a proper statistical inquiry could ever be made, I am sure the evidence would be the other way.) We are reconciled to living only once, except through our children, for whom we are perfectly happy to notice that we must make way, and room. We speculate that it is at least possible that, once people accepted the fact of their short and struggling lives, they might behave better toward each other and not worse. We believe with certainty that an ethical life can be lived without religion. And we know for a fact that the corollary holds true�that religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.
Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account when he wrote to the one who says, "I am so made that I cannot believe."
There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.
While some religious apology is magnificent in its limited way�one might cite Pascal�and some of it is dreary and absurd�here one cannot avoid naming C. S. Lewis�both styles have something in common, namely the appalling load of strain that they have to bear. How much effort it takes to affirm the incredible! The Aztecs had to tear open a human chest cavity every day just to make sure that the sun would rise. Monotheists are supposed to pester their deity more times than that, perhaps, lest he be deaf. How much vanity must be concealed�not too effectively at that�in order to pretend that one is the personal object of a divine plan? How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one's own sin? How many needless assumptions must be made, and how much contortion is required, to receive every new insight of science and manipulate it so as to "fit" with the revealed words of ancient man-made deities? How many saints and miracles and councils and conclaves are required in order first to be able to establish a dogma and then�after infinite pain and loss and absurdity and cruelty�to be forced to rescind one of those dogmas? God did not create man in his own image. Evidently, it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization.
The mildest criticism of religion is also the most radical and the most devastating one. Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did. Still less can they hope to tell us the "meaning" of later discoveries and developments which were, when they began, either obstructed by their religions or denounced by them. And yet�the believers still claim to know! Not just to know, but to know everything. Not just to know that god exists, and that he created and supervised the whole enterprise, but also to know what "he" demands of us�from our diet to our observances to our sexual morality. In other words, in a vast and complicated discussion where we know more and more about less and less, yet can still hope for some enlightenment as we proceed, one faction�itself composed of mutually warring factions�has the sheer arrogance to tell us that we already have all the essential information we need. Such stupidity, combined with such pride, should be enough on its own to exclude "belief" from the debate. The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species. It may be a long farewell, but it has begun and, like all farewells, should not be protracted.
The argument with faith is the foundation and origin of all arguments, because it is the beginning�but not the end�of all arguments about philosophy, science, history, and human nature. It is also the beginning�but by no means the end�of all disputes about the good life and the just city. Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other. For this reason, I would not prohibit it even if I thought I could. Very generous of me, you may say. But will the religious grant me the same indulgence? I ask because there is a real and serious difference between me and my religious friends, and the real and serious friends are sufficiently honest to admit it. I would be quite content to go to their children's bar mitzvahs, to marvel at their Gothic cathedrals, to "respect" their belief that the Koran was dictated, though exclusively in Arabic, to an illiterate merchant, or to interest myself in Wicca and Hindu and Jain consolations. And as it happens, I will continue to do this without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition�which is that they in turn leave me alone. But this, religion is ultimately incapable of doing. As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything. |
http://www.slate.com/id/2165033/entry/2165035/ |
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EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
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| Posted: Sat May 26, 2007 7:30 pm Post subject: |
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Amen. If the religious were tolerant, I could tolerate them.
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postfundie
Joined: 28 May 2004
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| Posted: Sat May 26, 2007 7:58 pm Post subject: |
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| We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake. We do not hold our convictions dogmatically: |
hahhhh atheists do not hold there convictions dogmatically.... 
oh yes Mao and Marx were sooo open minded....I like Hitchens and religious thinking is more often than not crapola but please !! |
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EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
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| Posted: Sat May 26, 2007 8:12 pm Post subject: |
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| postfundie wrote: |
| hahhhh atheists do not hold there convictions dogmatically.... |
No, we absolutely, without any doubt, do not! At least, if I were an athiest, I wouldn't!
To us Agnostics, it's all a lot of tomato/tomahto.
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samd
Joined: 03 Jan 2007
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| Posted: Sun May 27, 2007 6:21 am Post subject: |
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God cannot be great, because he/she/it doesn't exist.
Just live your life trying to be a good person and that will be your reward.
Heaven is a scam. This is it. |
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ddeubel
Joined: 20 Jul 2005
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| Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 3:37 am Post subject: |
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I won't even begin to educate you on all that Hitchens has been wrong about -- and I'm also glad that he was thrown on his ass by Harper's
I won't even begin to educate you, BJWD, that what you are stating is RELIGIOUS. You have no idea what "religion" is and thus, spill and muck about all over the intellectual carte.
Sad how you decry religion while holding up a screaming flag in the name of something which itself is the same.... Blinders and ......
DD
Read Kung's seminal work -- Does God exist? Then get back to me....... Or maybe Huxley's Perennial philosophy or Jame's, Varieties of ....even some Bertrand Russell. Or this work of Lang I'll use in retort to you and C.H.
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| Evidence! that was the stumbling block of anthropology. We still hear, in the later works of Mr. Max M�ller, the echo of the old complaints. Anything you please, Mr. Max M�ller says, you may find among your useful savages, and (in regard to some anthropologists) his criticism is just. You have but to skim a few books of travel, pencil in hand, and pick out what suits your case. Suppose, as regards our present theme, your theory is that savages possess broken lights of the belief in a Supreme Being. You can find evidence for that. Or suppose you want to show that they have no religious ideas at all; you can find evidence for that also. Your testimony is often derived from observers ignorant of the language of the people whom they talk about, or who are themselves prejudiced by one or other theory or bias. How can you pretend to raise a science on such foundations, especially as the savage informants wish to please or to mystify inquirers, or they answer at random, or deliberately conceal their most sacred institutions, or have never paid any attention to the subject? |
DD |
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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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| Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 3:41 am Post subject: |
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| ddeubel wrote: |
I won't even begin to educate you, BJWD, that what you are stating is RELIGIOUS. You have no idea what "religion" is and thus, spill and muck about all over the intellectual carte. |
You couldn't educate me. I saw that "teaching" video on your site.. I was a far better teacher than you even at the peak of my hakwon cowboy days.
That aside, what am I stating? |
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stevemcgarrett
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
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| Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 3:41 am Post subject: |
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God doesn't need your approval; you need His.
When or if you finally come to that realization, you'll be on the road home. Until then, you'll come across as just another arrogant humanist. |
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cosmo
Joined: 09 Nov 2006
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| Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 3:59 am Post subject: |
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Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
Albert Einstein |
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EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
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| Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 4:55 am Post subject: |
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| stevemcgarrett wrote: |
God doesn't need your approval; you need His.
When or if you finally come to that realization, you'll be on the road home. Until then, you'll come across as just another arrogant humanist. |
Sorry, Steve, but, dude, you're a CHRISTIAN?
Ain't that rich. |
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EFLtrainer
Joined: 04 May 2005
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| Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 4:56 am Post subject: |
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| cosmo wrote: |
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.
Albert Einstein |
So THAT'S it! I'm shipwrecked!
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Rteacher
Joined: 23 May 2005
Location: Western MA, USA
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| Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 5:27 am Post subject: |
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God is unknown to the ignorant and envious (who nonetheless insist on posting condemnable nonsense decrying the greatness of God...
First, try sincerely seeking out who God is. The conclusion of all Vedic literatures and authorities is that Krishna, speaker of Bhagavad-gita, is the Supreme Personality of Godhead...
He appeared on schedule at the onset of this cosmic age about 5000 years ago, performed amazing feats such as lifting an entire mountain with his little finger (at age 7) and devouring a forest fire by inhaling it.
He is the source of all Vishnu expansions and incarnations, and He's the original spiritual master, imparting transcendental knowledge into the heart of Brahma, the first created being (who passed essential knowledge on to his sons and disciples in a disciplic succession continuing to this day...)
During the course of speaking Bhagavad-gita to Arjuna, He cleared up any doubt about his unsurpassed greatness by displaying his four-armed Vishnu and gigantic Universal forms:
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Nowhere Man
Joined: 08 Feb 2004
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| Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 5:33 am Post subject: |
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May 27:
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| How have I slung mud? |
May 28:
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God is unknown to the ignorant and envious (who nonetheless insist on posting condemnable nonsense decrying the greatness of God...
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Rteacher
Joined: 23 May 2005
Location: Western MA, USA
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| Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 5:57 am Post subject: |
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Most people are innocently ignorant, and should not be unnecessarily agitated or criticised... Envious atheists who dare to publicly deride God deserve to be thoroughly condemned for discouraging people from taking up spiritual life.
So-called religious or spiritual people who are materialistic and corrupt are even worse in terms of destroying people's faith...
I really don't think any of the posters on these forums are demonic atheists - just misled by a few high-profile ones cloaked in science... |
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ED209
Joined: 17 Oct 2006
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| Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 6:28 am Post subject: |
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| stevemcgarrett wrote: |
God doesn't need your approval; you need His.
When or if you finally come to that realization, you'll be on the road home. Until then, you'll come across as just another arrogant humanist. |
I agree, there is only one god and his name is Allah and Mohammed is his prophet, Jesus was not the son of Allah since Allah wants not for such things as a son. If you don't realize this you will go to hell for an eternity. If you dismiss it then you are no better than an atheist.
Is there an emoticon for beheading, please help me out. |
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