Is God dead? Atheism finds a market in U.S

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.

"If God said murder is okay, would you agree that it is okay? If no, then is murder wrong because God said it's wrong, or is murder simply wrong?"

This is one of the points addressed by Pope Benedict's talk (I should say his "widely-noted but not widely-enough-read talk") last month at Regensburg University

He asked whether, from an Islamic point of view, God is so transcendant as to transcend His own character; in other words, can God be arbitrary and capricious, can He be deceitful and irrational, can He command evil equally with good?

Or, in contrast, is the Christian tradition correct when it says that God is identified with reason (Logos) and that the truths of reason are ultimately reconcilable with faith? In which case, the character of God is expressed in both the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature; that is, both in his revealed laws and in the laws of His creation: they are actually embedded in the structure of reality.

Everybody knows that parts of the Muslim world reacted to the Pope's question by having a riot and violence spree; but far fewer people know that some Muslim scholars responded with a reasoned discussion --- a welcome development indeed.

"For another example, slavery was allowed under God's word (the Bible) and existed for a very long time in Christian societies. Today it is not acceptable in Christian societies. God's word -- and his morals regarding slavery -- remained the same, but the society evolved and decided that slavery was no longer moral despite God's word."

This is a common misunderstanding. Let's think further about the development of doctrine in Scripture --- the progressive nature of revelation.

The Bible (unlike the Koran) is understood to be a progressive revelation; in other words, God's will and purposes are only gradually revealed. When particular issues are obscure or contradictory, the classic approach is to "let Scripture interpret Scripture" --- in other words, to let later or clearer teachings illuminate earlier or more obscure readings.

God never ordered slavery, but did allow His revelation to be given to a society in which slavery was already an established institution. He later carried out His greatest and most splendid work in ancient history by taking the side of the slaves and freeing the Hebrews from their Egyptian taskmasters.

Later teaching of Hebrew Scripture repeatedly emphasizes that they are not to oppress the poor, or the sojourner, or the foreigner, "because you yourselves were once slaves in Egypt." In other words, they are not to force socially marginal or powerless people into slavery.

Centuries later, in St. Paul's letter to Philemon, we have the matured teaching that Philemon should welcome back his runaway manservant, Onesimus, not as a slave, but "as something better, a dear brother." This again shows the progressive nature of Biblical revelation.

Slavery (or better: dependent labor) came in many forms, some of which were brutal and inhuman, and others of which were benign and mutually advantageous.

Every family that works together as a unit on a family enterprise --- an extremely common and extremely creative arrangement in human culture ---- involves "dependent labor" of, presumably, the wife and kids (assuming the husband/father is the manager and head of household) and has been the key to the prospering of many a "dependent."

Any additional dependent laborers --- including apprentices, indentured servants, etc. --- may be (not "must" be, but may be) almost on the same status level as members of the household.

Think of the portrayal of the "cotters" who worked as serfs or tenants of the exemplary good manager Lavrans in "Kristin Lavransdatter." If you had a good master you were prosperous, productive, respected and respectable.

But then Lavrans was a devout Christian who recognized the essential spiritual equality between himeself and his cotters.

While dependent labor within a household is taken as a given, no form of chattel slavery can be justified by the precept or the example of the Christianity's divine Founder; moreover, Christians who bought and sold slaves, or who did not treat all in the household as brothers and sisters in the Lord, were condemned ---- even at the time --- by their fellow Christians, as having betrayed the cause of the Christ.

Fast-forward to the 5th century AD, and you see St. Patrick of Ireland, whose own experience in captivity left him with a hatred of the institution of slavery; he become the first human being in the history of the world to speak out unequivocally against it (in his Letter to Coroticus) as being morally evil.

The pastoral insistence that dependent farm laborers had a right to marriage, legitimacy, family, home, and livelihood influenced the replacement of slavery by serfdom : by the time of Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century slavery was unknown in Chrstian Europe except at the fringes which interfaced with the Muslim slave trade. Consider too the early Papal outcries against slavery (Pope Eugene IV: Sicut Dudum, 1435; Paul III: Sublimis Deus, 1537)--- and this at the very beginning of the Age of Exploration.

Was it that "slavery was no longer moral despite God's word? By no means. All those Christians who spoke out against slavery explicitly did so on the basis of Scriptural principle. It is a development of doctrine, rooted in the insistence of St. Paul that Philemon's slave Onesimus was to be "accepted as a brother."

Is this the way a fundamentalist would handle the slavery question? No. By no means.

But then, Catholicism is not fundamentalist.

How else is eating pork a sin in the OT and Quran? It was a health rule in that society that got put into the religion. The health aspect is gone now that we know how to properly preserve and cook pork and why it's important, but the moral prohibition still remains for those who believe.

Oh??

NIV 1 Corinthians 8:4-8
4. So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one.
5. For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many "gods" and many "lords"),
6. yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live.
7. But not everyone knows this. Some people are still so accustomed to idols that when they eat such food they think of it as having been sacrificed to an idol, and since their conscience is weak, it is defiled.
8. But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.

NIV 1 Corinthians 10:25-31
25. Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience,
26. for, "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it."
27. If some unbeliever invites you to a meal and you want to go, eat whatever is put before you without raising questions of conscience.
28. But if anyone says to you, "This has been offered in sacrifice," then do not eat it, both for the sake of the man who told you and for conscience' sake --
29. the other man's conscience, I mean, not yours. For why should my freedom be judged by another's conscience?
30. If I take part in the meal with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of something I thank God for?
31. So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.

NIV Colossians 2:16
Therefore do not let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a New Moon celebration or a Sabbath day.

NIV Hebrews 13:9
Do not be carried away by all kinds of strange teachings. It is good for our hearts to be strengthened by grace, not by ceremonial foods, which are of no value to those who eat them.

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