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.

Now, given that God is omnipotent and eternal, it seems that a little crucifixion wouldn't seem like much to him. At worst it was a slightly unpleasant end to a business trip.

You falsely portray the situation. Since God is omnipotent, He can allow whatever He desires to come to pass, even to Himself. The question is not what CAN God do, it is what will God CHOOSE to do.

God comes to Earth in the form of a man. When He does this, He immediately makes Himself subject to whatever a human male suffers. For the first time, God has to eat, drink water, use the bathroom, suffer pain, etc. He doesn't have to, but being omnipotent, He can choose to. And He chooses to as a simple act of compassion.

Now that he is temporarily existing in the form of a human male, God is subject to the extreme agony of crucifixion. This is possibly one of the most painful deaths a human can suffer. It's true that God does indeed go back to heaven and continue His reign, but here's the point: the sacrifice doesn't lie in the fact that He died. The sacrifice lies in the pain He suffered. Essentially, He took on the pain that we humans are required to suffer because of sin. We are required to suffer the pain of existence in Hell. But since crucifixion is such a painful death, and since it quite possibly was as painful as going to Hell, God was suffering the pain of Hell FOR us so that we wouldn't have to. And therein lies the sacrifice.

It's true that God went back to heaven to continue His rule. But He does not forget the sacrifice He made. He chooses to remember it, because He knows he did it out of His love for us. We continue to spit in His eyes and mock and curse Him...but He still remembers out of His love that He endured the pain of Hell for us. It is also worth mentioning that despite being omnipotent, he bears the scars of his death. God, or Jesus, still has scars in His hands where the nails penetrated...and for time and eternity, He will always wear those scars. They will eternally remind Him of the "agony and ecstasy" of creating humanity.

Honestly, no Christian has ever been able to explain this to me, and I've read a LOT of apologetics.

The answer being fairly simple (pardon my long-windednes), I find that hard to believe.

So the end question is, where is the sacrifice?

I think you are using the word "sacrifice" as as a verb meaning a voluntary deprivation as in "I'm sacrificing my vacation to paint my elderly aunt's house".

While that would be an accurate description of what Jesus did, the word "sacrifice" is also used as a noun, as in:

"And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma." Ephesians 5:2

A sacrifice is a substitute. Jesus became a substitute (noun) and offering (noun) for our sins. Explaining the significance of that means getting into heavy duty theology way beyond my ability to capsule in a few words. But I'm just pointing out that to understand Jesus' sacrifice, you have to understand both meanings of the term.

I'm sure you have gotten the response that Jesus' "sacrifice" was "voluntary deprivation" in the extreme (which it was), but I understand why you might not think it was that big a deal given a Divine perspective. But you have to dig into the other meaning of "sacrifice" to understand the full meaning of what Jesus did and became.

Hope that advances the argument for you.

Faith Does Breed Charity
We atheists have to accept that most believers are better human beings. Roy Hattersley

Hurricane Katrina did not stay on the front pages for long. Yesterday's Red Cross appeal for an extra 40,000 volunteer workers was virtually ignored.

The disaster will return to the headlines when one sort of newspaper reports a particularly gruesome discovery or another finds additional evidence of President Bush's negligence. But month after month of unremitting suffering is not news. Nor is the monotonous performance of the unpleasant tasks that relieve the pain and anguish of the old, the sick and the homeless - the tasks in which the Salvation Army specialise.

The Salvation Army has been given a special status as provider-in-chief of American disaster relief. But its work is being augmented by all sorts of other groups. Almost all of them have a religious origin and character.

Notable by their absence are teams from rationalist societies, free thinkers' clubs and atheists' associations - the sort of people who not only scoff at religion's intellectual absurdity but also regard it as a positive force for evil.

The arguments against religion are well known and persuasive. Faith schools, as they are now called, have left sectarian scars on Northern Ireland. Stem-cell research is forbidden because an imaginary God - who is not enough of a philosopher to realise that the ingenuity of a scientist is just as natural as the instinct of Rousseau's noble savage - condemns what he does not understand and the churches that follow his teaching forbid their members to pursue cures for lethal diseases.

Yet men and women who believe that the Pope is the devil incarnate, or (conversely) regard his ex cathedra pronouncements as holy writ, are the people most likely to take the risks and make the sacrifices involved in helping others. Last week a middle-ranking officer of the Salvation Army, who gave up a well-paid job to devote his life to the poor, attempted to convince me that homosexuality is a mortal sin.

Late at night, on the streets of one of our great cities, that man offers friendship as well as help to the most degraded and (to those of a censorious turn of mind) degenerate human beings who exist just outside the boundaries of our society. And he does what he believes to be his Christian duty without the slightest suggestion of disapproval. Yet, for much of his time, he is meeting needs that result from conduct he regards as intrinsically wicked.

Civilised people do not believe that drug addiction and male prostitution offend against divine ordinance. But those who do are the men and women most willing to change the fetid bandages, replace the sodden sleeping bags and - probably most difficult of all - argue, without a trace of impatience, that the time has come for some serious medical treatment. Good works, John Wesley insisted, are no guarantee of a place in heaven. But they are most likely to be performed by people who believe that heaven exists.

The correlation is so clear that it is impossible to doubt that faith and charity go hand in hand. The close relationship may have something to do with the belief that we are all God's children, or it may be the result of a primitive conviction that, although helping others is no guarantee of salvation, it is prudent to be recorded in a book of gold, like James Leigh Hunt's Abu Ben Adam, as "one who loves his fellow men". Whatever the reason, believers answer the call, and not just the Salvation Army. When I was a local councillor, the Little Sisters of the Poor - right at the other end of the theological spectrum - did the weekly washing for women in back-to-back houses who were too ill to scrub for themselves.

It ought to be possible to live a Christian life without being a Christian or, better still, to take Christianity à la carte. The Bible is so full of contradictions that we can accept or reject its moral advice according to taste. Yet men and women who, like me, cannot accept the mysteries and the miracles do not go out with the Salvation Army at night.

The only possible conclusion is that faith comes with a packet of moral imperatives that, while they do not condition the attitude of all believers, influence enough of them to make them morally superior to atheists like me. The truth may make us free. But it has not made us as admirable as the average captain in the Salvation Army.

By Guardian Unlimited © Copyright Guardian Newspapers 2006
Published: 9/12/2005

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/9-12-2005-76579.asp

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