And when I'm ON them, I'm downright BEAUTIFUL!!
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.
Close...
A major component of MAN is the unwillingness to admit that certain things are sinful, and not just sinful "for some" (as they love to opine), but sinful for everyone.
Actually, those verses are direct quotations from the King James version. You quote another version, which is, indeed, quite differently phrased.
In any case, the quotations are taken out of context and, thus, are useless for any purpose.
It's easy to find individual verses in the Bible, in whatever translation, that seem to contradict other verses. It's also dishonest to so use them.
You may have known that the KJV included those verses, or you may not. However, your quotation of them from a different translation doesn't make them go away from the most widely-used English translation of the Bible. It's not a good argument.
Civilization gives men the means for the weakest to kill the strongest. Murder is a legal definition of the nature of a particular type of homocide.
Not all people agree on what murder is... Abortion is homocide without a trial by a jury of the victim's peers; it is a ritual murder, a human sacrifice on an altar of conceit performed before an idol of vanity.
Capital punishment is a legally adjudicated, jury approved act of homocide.
And now....
BREAKFAST!
Golden Rule. Just because you haven't thought much about this, that doesn't mean nobody has.
I went through that line of reasoning in my late teens and early 20's. The fact is there is no moral right or wrong unless established and enforced by God or (for sake of arguement...there being no God....) the stronger more cohesive groups of humans who can forcefully impose their visions of morality on weaker groups of humans!
The book "Lord of the Flies" paints a dark and horrifying vision of what humans do when all restraints are taken from them! There again it's only dark and horrifying to my "point of view"....it may be idyllic to another's point of view.
The strongest "point" of view too often in our world is often an example of co-ercion via gun "point"!
Democratic Republics are fragile constructs...the World fears the US for not what it is but what it could become....Imagine Rome with Nukes and the ability to project lethal force as far as the moon when deemed expedient...that is what the World really fears!
Well said, thanks for the reminder! :-)
Elsie, dear, you're so cute when you're off your meds!
So, by your line of reasoning, prisons should be full of atheists, right?
Jihad...teaching sin in schools as "human rights"....atheism....the Devil has been very, very busy lately.
And when I'm ON them, I'm downright BEAUTIFUL!!
Well, I think that God the Father is P.O.ed because WE give satan so much control. The Bible says that if we resist Satan he will flee from us. Many Christians avoid the sins you mentioned. The temptations from satan are powerful and he attacks us in our most vulnerable area, but Christ in us is more powerful and we are more than conquerors.
I was responding to a question regarding whether there exists an intrinsic sense of "right or wrong' within the behavioral centers on humans or is "right and wrong" an exogenously applied mental/moral construct for every person.
As for prisons, they seem to have become a rising breeding ground for radical Islam, an extremely agressive religion that enshrines the worst of vices in a quasi religious shell!
Jesus embodied the very consciousness of God in Human form.
Jesus was God's thumbprint stamped into our matter universe. When Jesus transitioned from life to death, God the father experienced the very consciousness of that death transition, God the father experienced the full physicality of being in a human body..."he was tempted at all points" as the apostle stated.
The full Godhead is forever marked as it were by its experience of being human, but in this process a way was opened up for humans to experience the essence of the Godhead.
So it is more than just "God goes back home to continue his rule." God goes home with his heal "bruised by the serpent, but he goes home with the serpent's head crushed!"
It is no coincidence Islamic pagans hate Israel, Jews, Christians and Western Civilization. The entire basis of Western Civilization is Mosaic Law, something both the Neo-Pagan Left and the pagan Islamic thugs cannot abide and wish to destroy.
The very idea that human beings have individual rights not subject to the whims of an earthly monarch, but subject to the laws of Yahweh, is directly from Moses.
Historically, this is proven over and over again with the successive conflicts between the forces of paganism and the Judaic culture. (This includes the idolatry of cultural Marxist paganism.)
I don't remember that bit in the Bible, but we'll say you're right. Again, how is even that amount of suffering anything to the all-powerful, infinite creator of the universe?
************
This poor man sounds emotionally fragile.
No, he is simply one of Satan's minions.
Res ipsa loquitur= "The thing itself speaks"
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