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.
I'd have to agree there. You might be interested in Brooke Allen's new book about the founders. She's right about a lot of the details, but not always correct or temperate in her interpretations. Her animus against the "religious right" blinds her to some of the complexities and ambiguities in the founders' America and our own.
Faith and doubt, religion and irreligion aren't sufficient in themselves to govern our lives. They're tied together in a knot that one can't simply untie or sever. You can't be all faith or all skepticism but need one to temper the other. A humanistic "faith in Mankind" has the problems of other religions. In the 20th century, it was a lot more dangerous than the older religions.
All we have gained then by our unbelief
Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,
For one of faith diversified by doubt:
We called the chess-board white-we call it black.
Robert Browning
I'm not sure Browning is entirely right -- people lose much when they lose religion -- but he's captures the interdependence of belief and skepticism quite well, and the very questionable benefit of atheism.
Thanks for the book idea. I will buy it.
You are asserting that because you believe the formation of the universe is unlikely without intelligent intervention, that intelligent intervention must have been involved. This is known as "appeal to ignorance". You are asserting that your lack of an alternative explanation is evidence for the explanation that you are putting forward. This is not a logical method of reasoning. You must provide positive evidence to support your claim in order for your claims to be credible.
You can find me at DarwinCentral.org.
No, I am saying that the formation of the universe is IMPOSSIBLE without intelligent intervention.
This is known as "appeal to ignorance".
Really? Perhaps I wasn't clear enough then. We are talking about the FORMation of the universe. From what?
A is from A, B is from B, A and B make AB.
Intelligent intervention forms life.
You are asserting that your lack of an alternative explanation is evidence for the explanation that you are putting forward. This is not a logical method of reasoning.
What? Because I can't explain that some primordial ooze can self-organize, THAT's why I can't claim intelligent intervention? ? ?
Occam's razor is also coming to mind.
You must provide positive evidence to support your claim in order for your claims to be credible.
DNA has information. Cells replicate. Who/What wrote the information? One of many examples.
Are you telling me that YOU have positive evidence to support your claim that order arises from disorder?
I'm glad you thought of me in pinging others to your post. Thank you. Keep up the Good Work!
"By further reflecting that the clearest evidence would be requisite to make any sane man believe in the miracles by which Christianity is supported,—and that the more we know of the fixed laws of nature the more incredible do miracles become,—that the men at that time were ignorant and credulous to a degree almost incomprehensible by us,—that the Gospels cannot be proven to have been written simultaneously with the events,—that they differ in many important details, far too important, as it seemed to me to be admitted as the usual inaccuracies of eye witnesses;—by such reflections as these, which I give not as having the least novelty or value, but as they influenced me, I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity as a divine revelation. The fact that many fake religions have spread over large portions of the earth like wildfire had some weight with me. But I was very unwilling to give up my belief; I feel sure of this, for I can remember often and often inventing day-dreams of old letters between distinguished Romans, and manuscripts being discovered at Pompeii or elsewhere, which confirmed in the most striking manner all that was written in the Gospels. But I found it more and more difficult, with free scope given to my imagination, to invent evidence which would suffice to convince me. Thus disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct."
( Charles Darwin in his Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Dover Publications, 1992, p. 62. )
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
"I think that generally (& more & more as I grow older), but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind."
( Quoted from Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991, p. 636. )
2 Timothy 4
1. In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge:
2. Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage--with great patience and careful instruction.
3. For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
4. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.
Nah...
A re-incarnation one!
"Ye MUST be born again!"
I thought this thread had whimpered away into the night!
But then you won't find out how the rest of us wonderful folks are doing!
While there are always time constraints (I only have time once a week or so to visit FR), we must always fight for what we believe in.
While there are always time constraints (I only have time once a week or so to visit FR), we must always fight for what we believe in.
While there are always time constraints (I only have time once a week or so to visit FR), we must always fight for what we believe in.
Do you have an opinion on this?
I think it fair to say that her view is that the founding fathers were the creatures of the enlightenment, and this nation was the product thereof, with religion in the sense used today, takinig a seat way in the back, and Christianity qua Christianity, not even in the vehicle. I find her persuasive on this. How about you?
It's a take, for political purpose.
Yes, she is grating in her slams on the modern religious right as the Great Satan, and the evil Rasputin aka Rove manipulating them for his execrable secular purposes. But one can just skim over that junk. That doesn't interest me.
I don't have a quarrel with much of what she says about the Founders. She comes closer to Washington and Jefferson than those who argue that such men were orthodox believers, but if you compare her views to those of 20th century thinkers who returned to religion, she looks rather naive about the secular prospects.
I would like to have heard more about the problems of the secular project and the disillusionment with it than Allen provides. In other words, to what extent was skepticism or deism or irreligion or secularism "a god that failed," and a turn back to a more orthodox creed inevitable? Allen does a good job in countering those who want to paint the Founding in wholly religious colors but I wouldn't want to write religion wholly out of early American history.
There's a good review of the Novaks' book about Washington in December's Liberty Magazine. Unfortunately it's not online, though a blog post is. Rowe takes the Novaks to task for arguing that if Washington wasn't a Deist, then he had to have been an Orthodox Protestant Christian.
For Rowe, Washington certainly wasn't a Deist, but Theism ("the belief in one God as the creator and ruler of the universe" or the "belief in the existence of a god or gods") doesn't necessarily imply acceptance of Orthodox Christian dogmas. It was similar with Jefferson, who was neither a Deist, nor an unbeliever, nor a Christian in the doctrinally orthodox sense of the word. Washington, though, was cooler towards Christianity and the figure of Jesus, than Jefferson was.
Rowe argues that Washington's reference to Jehova in his letter to the Hebrew congregation of Savannah, Georgia doesn't imply a belief in the biblical deity any more than his mentioning the "Great Spirit" in letters to the Cherokee is an endorsement of Native American religion.
I don't have any authoritative answer to this, but there is a parallel between Washington and Lincoln: both believed in a "Providence" that ruled the universe, and both maintained a distance from Christianity as a belief in Christ's divinity. For Lincoln, a strongly Calvinist background colored his thinking. Washington's heritage was 18th century Anglican, and thus quite different in its emotional coloring, but both men stood outside Christianity as it's usually understood.
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