Posted on 10/18/2006 5:25:05 PM PDT by wagglebee
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A fresh wave of atheistic books has hit the market this autumn, some climbing onto best-seller lists in what proponents see as a backlash against the way religion is entwined in politics.
"Religion is fragmenting the human community," said Sam Harris, author of "Letter to a Christian Nation," No. 11 on the New York Times nonfiction list on October 15.
There is a "huge visibility and political empowerment of religion. President George W. Bush uses his first veto to deny funding for stem cell research and scientists everywhere are horrified," he said in an interview.
Religious polarization is part of many world conflicts, he said, including those involving Israel and Iran, "but it's never discussed. I consider it the story of our time, what religion is doing to us. But there are very few people calling a spade a spade."
His "Letter," a blunt 96-page pocket-sized book condensing arguments against belief in quick-fire volleys, appeared on the Times list just ahead of "The God Delusion," by Richard Dawkins, a scientist at Oxford University and long-time atheist.
In addition, Harris' "The End of Faith," a 2004 work which prompted his "Letter" as a response to critics, is holding the No. 13 Times spot among nonfiction paperbacks.
Publishers Weekly said the business has seen "a striking number of impassioned critiques of religion -- any religion, but Christianity in particular," a probably inevitable development given "the super-soaking of American politics and culture with religion in recent years."
Paul Kurtz, founder of the Council for Secular Humanism and publisher of Free Inquiry magazine, said, "The American public is really disturbed about the role of religion in U.S. government policy, particularly with the Bush administration and the breakdown of church-state separation, and secondly with the conflict in the Mideast."
They are turning to free thought and secular humanism and publishers have recognized a taste for that, he added.
"I've published 45 books, many critical of religion," Kurtz said. "I think in America we have this notion of tolerance ... it was considered bad taste to criticize religion. But I think now there are profound questions about age-old hatreds."
The Rev. James Halstead, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at Chicago's DePaul University, says the phenomenon is really "a ripple caused by the book publishing industry."
"These books cause no new thought or moral commitment. The arguments are centuries old," he told Reuters. Some believers, he added, "are no better. Their conception of God, the Divine-Human-World relationship are much too simplistic and materialistic."
Too often, he said, the concept "God" is misused "to legitimate the self and to beat up other people ... to rehash that same old theistic and atheistic arguments is a waste of time, energy and paper."
Dr. Timothy Larsen, professor of theology at Wheaton College in Illinois, says any growth in interest in atheism is a reflection of the strength of religion -- the former being a parasite that feeds off the latter.
That happened late in the 19th century America when an era of intense religious conviction gave rise to voices like famed agnostic Robert Ingersoll, he said.
For Christianity, he said, "It's very important for people of faith to realize how unsettling and threatening their posture and rhetoric and practice can feel to others. So it's an opportunity for the church to look at itself and say 'we have done things ... that make other people uncomfortable.' It is an opportunity for dialogue."
Larsen, author of the soon-to-be-published "Crisis of Doubt," added that in some sense atheism is "a disappointment with God and with the church. Some of these are people we wounded that we should be handling pastorally rather than with aggressive knockdown debate."
These are also probably some of the same people Harris says he's hearing from after his two books.
"Many, many readers feel utterly isolated in their communities," he said. "They are surrounded by cult members, from their point of view, and are unable to disclose their feelings."
"I get a lot of e-mail just expressing incredible relief that they are not alone ... relieved that I'm writing something that couldn't be said," Harris added.
Yes
Junior -- So you're going to read something into the Bible that isn't there.
Biblical literalism means adding to the Bible literally anything you want.
Each one of us will discover the answer to that question at the end of our earthly life.
What is really great is that those of us who know he is not dead are prepared to eventually meet him!
Point well taken. The word "fundamentalist," has --- like one of Mrs. Don-o's sweaters --- been stretched too far to cover too much. Sorry about that!
Instead of "fundamentalist," I probably should have said "simplistic and literalist." I apologize to the anti-slavery fundamentalists and will try not to repeat this error.
Don't keep us in suspense. What level are you on?
Indeed.
It isn't the the magnitude of God that makes his actions small, but rather the magnitude of God that makes His deeds so great. To misunderstand this is to misunderstand how high God really is and what it means that he bowed so low.
jw
Not that there is a huge market for such tracts, but many intelligent religious writers are crippled from writing anti-atheistic polemics. They are constrained by things like humility, charity, and good habits of argument. Harris and Dawkins, among others, rarely suffer from such inconvenient limitations.
Then it is not a religion. Religion needs something external to which to relate its practitioner - be it a god or an idol. If everything is wrapped up in me, then there are no externals left. And then a religion needs an organizational apparatus - the priests and the flock to be fleeced. Your description demonstrates their complete absence, both on ideological and organizational levels. Thus it is not a religion. Q.E.D.
I'd say that taking phrases and exerpts from anything and using them out of context is a mistake. If done deliberately, it's dishonest.
Doesn't matter what the work is.
I don't think dangling participles are the worst things up with which we have to put.
I am a sentient being, not clay. God could no more morally treat me like an object to be disposed at will than I can do the same to my kids.
Interesting dodge. One has to be indoctrinated in the worldview to discuss the worldview. I wonder if the same holds for Islam?
Absit invidia.
Accipere quam facere praestat injuriam.
Clay Achin' placemarker
“The first thing that must strike a non-Christian about a Christian’s faith is that it is all too daring.
It seems too beautiful to be true: The mystery of being, unveiled as absolute love, coming down to wash the feet and the souls of its creatures; a love that assumes the whole burden of our guilt and hate, that accepts the accusations that shower down, the disbelief that veils God again when he has revealed himself, all the scorn and contempt that nails down his incomprehensible movement of self-abasement—all this, absolute love accepts in order to excuse his creature before himself and before the world.”
Hans Urs von Balthasar
I hear you, but it's still, in my opinion, a no-go. As tortures and deaths go, Jesus got off easily. It might have meant something if he'd hung there for days (as most crucifiction victims did) rather than popping off in a couple of hours. I can think of any number of execution methods that would have made a more significant point about suffering and dying -- impalement comes to mind. Basically what I'm trying to say is a vastly greater number of human beings have died in much more horrific circumstances than Jesus, so the latter's "death" seems kind of chintzy -- especially since his "death" is more like a "death" in a video game in that it really didn't affect him at all.
God, in His divine nature, does not suffer; He dwells in bliss. That is why He became Man, in Christ: Christ is the compassion of God.
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