Posted on 08/06/2007 2:27:37 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Three recent best-selling authors - Christopher Hitchens in "God Is Not Great," Richard Dawkins in "The God Delusion" and Sam Harris in "The End of Faith" - use flawed history to support their arguments. All three assert that atheism must replace religious faith because the past proves the dangers of religion so persuasively that only denying God will save us from the crimes of religion. They offer historical evidence based on a framework that most historians abandoned when it broke down during the great upheavals of the past century.
In denying God, they also deny the history of the 20th century.
The three books adopt a 19th-century view of history that posits a war between science and religion. Europe suffered through a dark age of a thousand years following the demise of Rome, broken only by the Renaissance and the subsequent victory of science during the 18th-century Enlightenment. Thinkers in the Victorian age exulted in science as the key to progress.
Our three authors accept this version of history - that religious faith stood as a barrier to reason, holding up Europe's progress for centuries - at face value. Harris imagines that if a "Kingdom of Reason" had emerged at the time of the Crusades, "we might have had modern democracy and the Internet by 1600." Instead, we got the Inquisition and other ills because religion deluded people into mistrusting evidence and accepting dogma. According to Hitchens, a "renewed Enlightenment" will save us from the horrors of religion.
The optimistic belief in human progress based on science and reason ran into the bloody history of the 20th century. Faced with world wars, genocide and oppressive totalitarian regimes inspired by secular ideologies, historians could no longer equate science with progress.
Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens each try to answer questions about modern atrocities based on secular beliefs. Dawkins offers an answer to the query "What about Hitler and Stalin? Weren't they atheists?" He dodges the issue by maintaining that Hitler was in some sense religious and that Stalin's atheism never motivated his brutality or the policies of his regime.
That assertion ignores the historical record. Stalin conducted savage persecutions of believers in the name of scientific atheism, frequently setting up museums of atheism in churches.
Harris deals with the same question in the afterword of his book's paperback edition. He finds the question about atheists such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Kim Jong-Il "depressing" because he answered it in the original edition. His original answer was no answer at all, only a muddled statement that the crimes of these regimes show us the dangers of not thinking critically about ideologies that are insufficiently rational.
Hitchens reminisces about his own days as a Trotskyite and bemoans these 20th-century movements for becoming dogmatic like religion. "All that the totalitarians have demonstrated is that the religious impulse - the need to worship - can take even more monstrous forms if it is repressed." As an example, Hitchens tells us that North Korea's communist regime is really a "debased yet refined form of Confucianism and ancestor worship." No wonder Hitchens' subtitle is "How Religion Poisons Everything": In his version of history, everything poisonous must be religious.
When the facts of the last century do not fit their Victorian historical narrative, the authors of atheism either ignore or distort them. They overlook the science of eugenics used to justify Nazi racial policy, and the scientific materialism of Marxism used to justify communist persecution of religion and all dissent. That was bad science to them, but they make no distinction between good and bad religion.
Harris states that any interpretation of a Scriptural text, no matter how far out, is fair enough. When it comes to science, all three avoid dealing with such examples as Marxism or social Darwinism, which were put forward as science. There is a double standard at work in their reading of history.
Irony abounds in these books as their authors invoke reason and the proper consideration of evidence while ignoring both in their casual and simplistic cherry-picking of the past for their own purposes. Their self-confinement within a dated grand narrative of the past undermines the credibility of their dogmatic assertions about history, and nowhere is that more obvious than in their denial of the history of the 20th century.
atheist is short for autotheist
not to mention the horror of the countless number of abortions performed each day but I guess that must be a religious thing too.
Who would you rather have as a neighbor, an atheist or an Islamist?
Perhaps. But what will save us from the crimes of Man?
Right.
And they will one day pay for their crimes.
So, by what standard can they say that “bad things” happening in the name of religion are bad?
These “thinkers” ignore (or are totally ignorant of) the history of science and reason that they so idolize. Modern science has its roots in the church of the middle ages. The scholastics and the establishment of universities stem from the middle ages and were intimately tied to religion and the religious of that time. If it hadn’t been for thousands of monks preserving and studiously copying the old manuscripts that survived from the fall of the empire the works that inspired so many to inquire and explore would have been irretrievably lost. It was the friars and monks who led the way in matters of inquiry and technology and it was from men like Albertus Magnus and Acquinas that logic and scientific inquiry got their greatest boosts. It is on the shoulders of these almost universally ignored giants of the middle ages that our modern world stands.
Athesists are the very persons they so voluably deplore. Dogmatic, rigid, ignorant and intolerant describes them quite well. They put their faith in the dead matter that surrounds them and make the fantastic claim that all life, thought, hope, honor, wisdom, truth, sacrifice, heroism and curiosity came about by the accidental congruence of inanimate atoms and molecules. And because matter is the root of all existence it follows that the manipulation of matter can bring about new, more desireable conditions. And when the efforts to manipulate fail the fallback position is to destroy the “things” supposed to be the root cause of the failure in an effort to expunge contamination and so bring about the purification that will eventually erupt in universal abundance and contentment. Hundreds of millions have suffered and died in the name of materialism and the fanatic cults that have spun off from this idiot creed. And the men who write this trash dare to call those who believe in God insane?
“Madness is the natural state of the carnal mind. For the madness of the carnal mind does not surrender itself in obedience to my instructions, but rather it surrenders itself to the will of the flesh: fleshy emotions, and man’s wisdom, and feelings, and pride. Would a man of a sound mind reject, spit on, persecute, beat, curse, and crucify the only savior, deliverer, and redeemer that God himself has sent to save man from eternal damnation? Would a man of a sound mind exalt his own foolish and doubtful opinions to be more righteous than the truth of God’s words? Would a man of sound mind make light of the commandments of the one and only living God? Would a man of sound mind even think to mock or defy the living God by speaking openly of his unbelief of the scriptures; the holy scriptures that were all given by the inspiration of God? Would a man of a sound mind be afraid of the correction of his loving heavenly Father? Would a man of a sound mind store up wrath for himself and call judgment and condemnation upon his own head by giving himself over to finding fault with, judging, accusing, and condemning his brother? Would a man of sound mind think that God is liar like unto man; that God is not going to require those whom he has called to give an account for the precious gift that has been given to him by God? I have called many”, says the Lord, “but only a very few have obeyed my voice and followed me. Only a few have judged, confessed, and surrendered their madness into the hands of my love for correction, repentance, and change.
Mitt Jeffords
BUMP
But what is their basis for good and bad (evil), right and wrong? Those concepts come from religion and the concept that there's a higher authority who has set standards by which men are to live. Without any standard to compare to, there can be no *good* and *bad*, *right* and *wrong*.
ping
Throughout history, most every tribe honored a higher being, including pagans.
If one needs proof that Jesus Christ died for us, just try the writings of Paul, the Apostle. Never before, or since, has anyone fought as hard as he to persecute Christians, only to be transformed into one of Christs leading disciples.
To some it is easy to ignore the truth. Woe to those that do not just “turn to dust”.
That depends. I need more info to decide.
Hadn’t heard that, but like it. Atheism IS a religion to its proponents.
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