Posted on 10/22/2005 8:16:33 PM PDT by TradicalRC
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris, New York: Norton, 336 pages, $24.95
For nearly as long as there have been villages, there have been village atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers who lovingly detail the many contradictions, fallacies, and absurdities that flow from belief in holy writ. As a strictly intellectual proposition, atheism would seem, on the face of things, to have wiped the floor with the believing opposition.
Still, village atheists are as numerous, and as shrill, as they’ve ever been, for the simple reason that the successive revolutions in thought that have furthered their cause—the Enlightenment and Darwinism—have been popular busts. As the secular mind loses mass allegiance, it becomes skittish and reclusive, succumbing to the seductive fancy that its special brand of wisdom is too nuanced, too unblinkingly harsh for the weak-minded Christer, ultraorthodox scold, or wooly pagan.
The faithful, meanwhile, take some understandable offense at this broad caricature of their mental capacity and ability to face life’s harder truths. So each side retreats to its corner, more convinced than ever that the other is trafficking in pure, self-infatuated delusion for the basest of reasons: Believers accuse skeptics and unbelievers of thoughtless hedonism and nihilism; the secular set accuses the believoisie of superstition and antiscientific senselessness.
Still, the vast majority of people comfortably tolerate the huge paradoxes that so exercise the super-faithful and their no-less-righteous secular pursuers. Americans are, after all, heir to the greatest Enlightenment traditions in self-government and tolerance, while also forming one of the most religion-mad polities in the industrialized West.
(Excerpt) Read more at reason.com ...
The death knell of religion has been sounding for centuries now, notably by those enlightened secularists; Machiavelli, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzche, Lenin et al.
A secularist libertarian would have a different creed. Secularists happen in many shapes and flavors, and it is an intellectual dishonesty to expand secularist statists into secularists in general.
True, not all secularists are statists as the libertarians and some other liberals prove. Yet, it remains a truism that most secularists have an antipathy towards religion.
It did strike me as a tautology, except that we have among us those who claim to be in both camps. This could of course be chalked up to sloppy logic on their part.
Religious toleration as a principle is a product of the accidents of English and American society in the 18th Century. When one takes a social methofology and make sit into a creed, we get something like what happened in France. The State becomes the Church.
"For nearly as long as there have been villages, there have been village atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers ... "
This gives me an excuse to post a poem.
Edgar Lee Masters (1868–1950). Spoon River Anthology. 1916.
The Village Atheist
YE young debaters over the doctrine
Of the soul’s immortality,
I who lie here was the village atheist,
Talkative, contentious, versed in the arguments
Of the infidels.
But through a long sickness
Coughing myself to death
I read the Upanishads and the poetry of Jesus.
And they lighted a torch of hope and intuition
And desire which the Shadow,
Leading me swiftly through the caverns of darkness,
Could not extinguish.
Listen to me, ye who live in the senses
And think through the senses only:
Immortality is not a gift,
Immortality is an achievement;
And only those who strive mightily
Shall possess it.
I saw this author on c-span somtime this past year talking about his book. I was saddened and felt ill at the same time. He was very smug in his holier than thou atheism. What really saddened me was he was speaking at the pulpit is some liberal church. There were Methodist, Presbyterian,Jewish and ministers there among others that did not state who they were during the question and answer section. They were laughing WITH him about GOD.
actually this is really really really simple, you either believe in god or you believe in the goodness of man. only one of those things can set equalibrium is this world. you cannot have both. chose
This must be a rejected proposal for his doctoral thesis. A thoughtful review of the book.
WRT Voltaire, atheist, French author, humanist, rationalist (1694 - 1778), he held up a copy of the Bible in the air and smugly proclaimed, "In 100 years this book will be forgotten and eliminated...". Shortly after his death, Voltaire’s private residence became the headquarters of the Geneva Bible Society and became a major distribution hub for the very Bible he assigned to extinction. It later became the headquarters for the British and Foreign Bible Society. This fool Frenchman made a vain boast. And now for eternity he shares the fate of all the fools who have continuously rejected God prior to their first death.
That's such a good thing.
Not a big fan of atheists. Many, as found in this forum, our nasty, petty, arrogant little people, obviously suffering from inferiority complexes. Some are OK though.
"Some are OK though."
The ones who are ok are probably really agnostics, no matter what they call themselves.
I would like to add a few reflections of my own on what I perceive as the inherent contradictions of "rational" critiques of faith (your mileage may vary).
1)It is illogical to denounce religion for killing people when in the absence of G-d neither mass murder, the extermination of the entire human race, nor anything else, can be objectively morally wrong. Ditto for criticisms of religious Fundamentalists for not acknowledging "the simple truth" when in the absence of G-d truth has absolutely no moral claim whatsoever, since morality cannot exist.
2)Materialists insist that only physical phenomena exist and that human thoughts are mere nerve impulses, then promptly criticize others for having different nerve impulses than themselves. Ditto for criticizing immoral behavior in purely material beings when in such a scenario a mass murderer is no more morally culpable for his actions than an erupting volcano.
3)One of the dogmas of "anti-dogmatists" is that reality is purely physical and ultimately meaningless and that human beings have no more purpose than cockroaches. Yet none of these people ever lives as though his life has no more meaning than a cockroach. Instead secularists are the world's champions at defining "goals" meaningless humanity should strive for or "problems" that he must solve (how anything can be construed as a "problem" in a universe in which it's a wonder that we're here at all is never explained). Indeed, he is obsessed with ethics even as he insists that mankind has no purpose. Yet he is determined to "attain the mind of G-d" and even gain control over the purely natural process that created him. Why would a cockroach wish to do such a thing?
I hope the reader will forgive me for some pride in pointing out that I myself made some of the points of the posted article in an essay at my own web site. Allow me to quote myself:
In addition to the utter subjectivism of any moral or ethical system based on Hellenistic reasoning there is another danger. Because the Hellenist is convinced that only the immediate can be known, anyone whose values system is based on Ultimate Things is regarded at best as a delusional obscurantist and at worst as a ticking irrational time bomb. The most inoffensive religious believer, the most benign private prayer, is a sign of insanity. Obviously, these people are dangerous. What if their G-d orders them to kill someone or to commit mass murder? Meanwhile, the Hellenist’s own dogmatic, unquestioned belief in his own rationality gives him a blank check to do the same things (when justified by what is immediate and "obvious") and moreover blinds him to this potential for evil within himself. Surely there is no need to point out at this stage of history that "rational men" are not at all above the most unrestrained violence and even killing. But of course, he never acts without a "rational" reason. The victims of the crusades died for no reason than the fanaticism of their killers; those executed by the rationalist Hellenist simply would not be rational. They would not cooperate. The Hellenist did not want to execute them, but they simply would not "see reason." Needless to say, this moral certitude is even more dangerous than that of one who believes in Ultimate Things, because the Hellenist’s moral certitude supposedly rests on "undeniable" immediate experience which "no sane person" could possibly doubt.
I'm a prophet! Who'd-a thunkit!
Well, the Democrats really don't have access to the arms yet or the necessary hinterlands populated by subsistence farmers.
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