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.
Unbelievable.
When you are in a place of deserved torment, for your own sins, with no chance whatsoever in eternity of escape...and you remember that Christ paid the price for your redemption....
You would give ANYTHING to accept that "empty gesture".
I pray that you will think again.
The problem is, that IS a belief. The fallacy of pretended neutrality is what gets the atheist every time. Take it for what it's worth - I believe Van Til nails it here:
Dr. Dooyeweerd holds that it is a form of idolotry to make theoretic thought, or aesthetic sense, or the economic aspect of life the self-sufficient point of departure for philosophy and all of culture, for it deifies one aspect of reality. Such a procedure, furthermore, is uncritical for it proceeds on the assumption of the self-sufficiency of theoretic thought or some other aspect of sublunar reality, and does not penetrate to its own inevitable presuppositions. It does not realize that it proceeds to build upon a religious, non-theoretic apriori and therefore remains imprisoned in uncritical dogmatism. For dogmatism is not the affirmation of truth, whether received by faith or ascertained by science, but [is rather] such an affirmation without a critical understanding of one's presuppositions, without realizing that all one's affirmations are religiously oriented and faith-oriented.
(Van Til, Henry R., The Calvinistic Concept of Culture. Grand Rapids, 1959. p176.)
Actually, a quick can of Raid is not a cruel or painful death for an insect. It's just a blast of poison, and you're dead. A painful death for an insect would be being eaten alive by another insect, say a swarm of ants. Were we to be eaten alive by a swarm of ants, it would be quite painful indeed.
Actually, I'd say your concept of "God" is rather limited. Your portraying Him as simply a very large thing.So he could get back up a couple of days later and go home? It sounds like a rather empty gesture.
No, that's not what happened at all. First off, after Jesus died, He went to Hell. After the Resurrection, he spent a significant time on Earth back among His followers laying the foundation for the church to come. He still bore the scars in His hands, that He will permanently bear, even throughout eternity. His ascension back into heaven signified that now, His followers were to begin to make sacrifices in his example to bring the gospel to all corners of the Earth. All Christians are required to make sacrifices; it is the foundation of our theology.
Christ's suffering was agonizing and extreme, but it was temporary. However, simply the existence of the suffering, despite the length, by God, is enough to atone for the sins of all humanity.
Please know that this man is evil. He is not just some atheist, he is advocating shutting up and getting rid completely of Christians in this country. He says we are a threat to the survival of the rest of the human race. I read his previous book, The End Of Faith, and it was the most vicious, frightening, Hitler like book I had ever read.
Now that would be fun. Of course I do know meat-eating pagans who think Greenpeace is full of it -- I have little tolerance for the kind you describe. Actually, where do some of the modern pagans get this vegetarianism? I'm pretty sure all of the pagans of old were meat eaters, too busy living to worry about whether they should be eating animals.
The strict definitions of the words aside, the point is that Jesus willfully experienced the punishment for humanity's sins.
Satan is determined to blind as many people to this fact as he can.
So many people will be lost needlessly as a result.
It takes Raid quite a while to kill a water bug, it lays on its back flailing around for a long time. I don't know how long, because I can't stand to see even a water bug "suffer" so I squish it after the Raid has immobilized it.
No, that's not what happened at all.
You get the general idea. Anything you specify can't be more than a slight inconvenience for an omnipotent divine being.
Believable, and no I don't fear Hell any more than I fear Hades, Jahannam or Di Yu. Do you fear those other places?
Okay, then if I were able to make myself the size of a bug, then that would be an excruciating way to suffer and die.
You get the general idea. Anything you specify can't be more than a slight inconvenience for an omnipotent divine being.
No, I don't get the general idea at all. I fail to see how any of it is a "slight inconvenience," considering that God willfully chooses to remember the pain and suffering He endured, out of His love for humanity. Which makes Him capable of forgiveness for our disobedience of Him. The sacrifice in itself doesn't have to be eternal: but the effects of the sacrifice ARE eternal. That is the point. Also, we now do not have to suffer that pain and agony because He did it for us.
?
I'll try not to preach a sermon, but simply defined, it means this: Mankind is infected with sin. Because of that, we are all doomed to punishment (eternity in Hell). But Jesus took that punishment upon Himself by suffering the agony of Hell by being crucified. He shed His divine Blood, and now, that Blood can wash away our sins, so that we do not have to suffer that punishment (again, eternity in Hell). Ahh...but the tragedy of man all through these years as he tramples that Blood underfoot, as if it were unholy.
Can't argue with that.
keeps me humble.
I just read the book. Three days after his "death" Jesus is up and walking around. Forty days after that, he's running the show. Nice for a day's worth of torture and a relatively quick "death." You might try reading the Bible one of these days and actually thinking about what you are reading, rather than just accepting what you've always been taught. God likes thinkers.
Your comment is simply another data point of the knee-jerkiness of the fundamentalists on this forum. Most of the old-time Christian "thinkers" are gone now, probably driven off by the same shrillness that's reduced FR's posting base and made the quarterly Freepathons take longer and longer each time.
I've been on this forum for eight-and-a-half years; the quality of discussion has gone down considerably. Indeed, there is no discussion any more. Those who don't toe the party line are considered "trolls" no matter how long they've been posting. Well, pretty soon this forum is going to be nothing but a one-note amen corner instead of the free-wheeling political discussion site it used to be. I guess this is how the French feel in light of the Moslem invasion.
I had to laugh at your question!
Those are direct quotes out of the bible. There are some pretty surprising things in there. Ever read Songs of Solomon/Song of Songs? Steamy stuff...
But herein you are dealing with people for whom everything is "religion." They cannot conceive of non-religion, so they have to shoehorn everything around them into a very narrow worldview. As the saying goes, to a six-year-old with a hammer everything is a nail.
I'm not sure why the poster chose those quotes (though I have my suspicions) but they are actual quotes from the bible. The first (Isaiah 16:11) was quoted from the King James Version, word for word.
The second was actually a quote of Ezekiel 23:20, not 23:21, though the latter verse is quite graphic in its own right (toned down a bit in your NKJV).
The third (2 Kings 18:27) is also a direct quote (word for word) from the King James Version.
All three need to be read in context but I know I was certainly surprised when I came across those verses for the first time.
There's a wonderful website called www.biblegateway.com that provides many, many different versions of the bible for free, and not just in English either. It can help to compare the different versions when faced with a difficult or confusing passage.
There are two more sites that are invaluable for bible study. The first is a Hebrew interlinear translation that can be found here:
http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/Hebrew_Index.htm
And the other is the Greek interlinear translation:
http://www.scripture4all.org/OnlineInterlinear/Greek_Index.htm
Those are free also.
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