Tyrannosaur soft tissue.
Posted on 08/02/2007 9:15:56 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback
Atheism has nearly always been with us in one form or another, but the atheists we’ve been hearing the most from lately—chiefly Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris—are a new breed. Unlike the old-school humanists, the new atheists—or anti-theists, as some of them prefer to be called—don’t want to just deny the existence of God, they want to wipe religion off the map.
Christopher Hitchens follows this pattern with his new book, belligerently titled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. In his first chapter, called “Putting It Mildly,” Hitchens writes, “I will continue to [respect my friends’ religious traditions] without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone.”
But this is something that religion is ultimately incapable of doing. “People of faith,” Hitchens continues, “are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all . . . hard-won human attainments. . . . Religion poisons everything.”
The way Hitchens lumps all religions and all believers into one category here is typical of his tone throughout the book, and typical of anti-theists in general. They don’t argue; they yell. They’ve decided that, simply because they dislike religion, there is no reason to respect it. In their minds, it’s stupid, dangerous, and that’s all that needs to be said.
That’s why I believe the anti-theist movement, as hot as it is right now with books like Hitchens’s topping the bestseller lists, is doomed to fail. The moment you take it seriously and start to study it, it falls apart. There’s no substance, just anger and a lot of hot air. Because anti-theists simply ignore evidence and arguments they don’t like, they’re ill-equipped to deal with them rationally.
The old-guard secular humanists are questioning this new trend, and rightly so. Most traditional atheists simply had their own belief system, and if we wanted our belief system that was okay. The new breed reflects the death of truth. They’re like the communists who feared religion more than anything else because it was a competing truth claim. The Star of David and the cross have been scandalous to every totalitarian leader.
Many traditional atheists and humanists seem to recognize the parallel and feel uncomfortable about it. As Gary Wolf writes in Wired, “The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who doesn’t join them is an ally of the Taliban.”
“Even those of us who sympathize intellectually,” he writes, “don’t want the New Atheists to succeed.”
When you think about it this way, you have to wonder if the anti-theists, in their heart of hearts, are a little uncomfortable with their own beliefs. After all, if you really believe that truth will win out—and to Hitchens and company, their idea of truth is so obvious that it cannot fail to win—you can let other people make their own claims and live by their own beliefs without feeling the need to destroy everything they stand for.
Because Hitchens and the others cannot do this, their polemics are destined to lead not to the end of religion, but to the collapse of their own movement. Not before, of course, they have gotten very rich. It’s not irrelevant to the debate that Dawkins, Hitchens, and Sam Harris sold one million copies of their angry diatribes last year. At two dollars a book for royalties, that’s not bad.
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A religion of ‘no religion’ cannot create a void and fail to experience the filling of that void...by, you guessed it, the resurgence of a ‘new’ competing religion, or the wise reestablishment of an old one...I think the emptiness of these pseudointellects is apparent and absurd. Christianity and Islam are in deadly conflict again, the ‘third great Jihad’..it is the wrong time to duck their heads and think they, with few followers, and no ‘issue’, meaning a cultural support for perverse relationships, planned parenthood, population reduction, etc., have any future. A group of wasted thinkers creating nothingness are starting at O and creating O. Easy to predict the result.
Bulls***.
You can't lump any other religion that I've seen in with Pislam.
The only thing Hitchens is good for is to stand up to the CAIR Hoopster.
Darn, I am not done. These guys really should abandon their effort to add 0 + 0 = 1 (cultural revisionists want to eliminate simple arithmetic also) and begin supporting the Christian based system that has given them the freedom to freeassociate themselves into nothiness to save their necks from the greatest institution of slavery in the history of the world...eom
I’m not sure I’d call the anti-theists new, per se. They’ve just been a lot bolder as of late.
atheist = autotheist
The decades of alcohol over-indulgence is finally showing its toll on the Christopher ‘leetle grey cells’. The man is on the downhill side of rational now, so it is anybody’s guess what will spew forth from him in the plummet.
Passed your comment on to a friend..eom
... If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even — for that is the seat of sympathy — he forthwith sets about reforming — the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers — and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it — that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; ... - Walden
read later
It seems likely, that all but a few men, alone and stranded on a desert island, probably dream first of a woman, and when one does not usually appear (I certainly would not completely rule out the possibility that one might appear),turns finally to God out of necessity, and if really desperate, maybe many gods if he is not comfortable with one...God and religion are the necessary elixir of life, and I have never personally heard or read of any primitive tribe with out one or more Gods...the Romans, for heavens sakes, had up to 30 thousand dieties, most obviously quite minor, and most of them absorbed from conquered tribes..perhaps their paganism was the richest and most prolific of all time. Reading the letters of Cicero, one realizes that all personal relationships had to be reestablished continually as the thinking and intentions of ones friends and acquaitenances were subject to too many religious influences at any point of time. Monotheism is elegant, and has produced the two most powerful religions of all time...no God or religion produces nothing. Too many Gods leads to confusion and the necessity of a King or Emperor, or the beginnings of a Republic that eventually, thru Constantine, adopted Christianity and began the adventure of the Great West..which may have seen its better days if it does not get refocussed. Islam is, unconfortably, too well focussed.
One who worships cars?
I like Atheists who have a genuine interest in the truth. Like them, I am absolutely certain that truth will win out. Unlike them, my certainty is that truth will inevitably point to the God of the Bible.
CS Lewis was an Atheist till his early 30’s, and at around the same age, God also revealed himself to me (or more rightly, my eyes were opened to what had always been there).
There are those Atheists though who claim to desire truth, yet whose mandate is more simply to spew their own dogma... but I’ve never stomached hypocrites of any stripe, and in the end, truth will win out.
" The whole world now knows that the tyrannosaur was just a big chicken with sharp teeth who lived a few thousand years ago..." (Link to a National Geographic article...)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
From the article:
Ancient collagen—the main protein component of bone—has been extracted from the remains of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, according to two new reports.
Get a clue; you make real believers in the Creator look bad...
I disagree. I can’t imagine Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould saying that scientists should focus their efforts on wiping out religion.
Ha ha - good one.
the tyrannosaur was just a big chicken with sharp teeth who lived a few thousand years ago
Ha ha ha ha - stop it, please!
The Earth may be more than a few thousand years old, but it was created by an Almighty God, and not by using evolution.
:-)
What did he use, then? ... Harry Potters wand ? ... Magic?
This is what you are left with.
By their fruits you shall know them.
That’s good enough for me.
Atheists want to dance with God and because they have their powerful science they figure they should lead the dance. Sometimes both are discoing and thatcoing, sometimes both are ignominiously kicked off the dance floor, sometimes a big woman in a big red jump suit shows up and starts singing the national anthem and they decide to go to the ball game, sometimes they go to the circus and volunteer each other for the knife throwing act or the sawing-in-half act, sometime they just get bored with each other and quietly read detective novels... but, bottom line, they can never let each other alone for long. Ah, love!
I wasn’t referring to people like Sagan and Gould.
Sorry, but I’m not sure if your kidding or not.
Tactics. Tactics. Satan keeps workin’ every angle. God keeps on keeping on. :-).
Dear Atheists of the World....
I’m right, you’re wrong. Go to hell, do not pass Go.
“People of faith,” Hitchens continues, “are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all . . . hard-won human attainments. . . . Religion poisons everything.”
Someone should send this guy that two part episode of South Park where Cartman goes to the future.
so I’m curious if “god” doesn’t exist, why not laugh at those who believe since fighting to prove a null is not possible?
as for me i read the “God delusion” by Richard Dawkins, i found it to be less than convincing, using fallacies to prove his point.
Wow, that is just ridiculous. There is no contradiction between Christianity and whatever method God chose to bring about creation.
That just about sums it up.
It takes more faith to be an atheist then to be a Christian.
Hmmm. I'll have to bring up this topic at the next church counsel meeting, right after we discuss our other diabolical plans of painting the nursery and scheduling visits to our members in nursing homes.
Tyrannosaur soft tissue.
I see your point, really, but my point is that Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris are currently the face of atheism. Though the bitter psycho atheist types have been with us for a long time, the public face of their movement has (with the exception of O’Hair) always been a person who disagreed with people of faith intellectually but respected their rights. The fact that three guys have made millions publishing the same crap in less than a year about how Christianity should be wiped out means something has changed.
Though I did say that I wanted to avoid this becoming a crevo thread, I feel I should answer this one here.
Atheists and evolutionists: At some point billions of years ago, an infinitely dense and hot singularity exploded and the entire Universe resulted.
Me: Oh? Well, where did the material for that singularity come from in the first place? Did Harry Potter create it with his wand? And what caused the explosion? Magical Teletubbies lighting their flatulence?
This is what you are left with.
1. Conversion by love and conversion by the sword are very different things.
2. You are ignoring or unaware of the evangelical aspect of many Eastern religions, especially their more recent offshoots. I can't tell you how many times a Buddhist friend of mine has tried to convince me that Buddhist practice is consistent with my faith. Sure, he's doing that because he thinks I'll be happier, but how is that any different from me wanting someone to become a Christian because i think they'll be happier and Jesus told me to?
I don't watch South Park...what does he find?
Not true. There is one glaring, irreconcilable contradiction:
What did Adam and Eve bring into the world?
What has to happen for natural selection to work on any real scale?
The answer to both questions is the same: Death.
Even if a Christain believes that the first three chapters of Genesis are a fable/poem/allegory (Jesus didn't, but if you want to argue with Him that's your business) it's an essential Christian doctrine that death came into the world as a result of human separation from God, and that Christ's sacrifice was the cure for this. It's also an essential component of evolutionism that billions of inferior critters had to die in order to bring forth the guy who sat down and wrote Genesis 1-3. Well, they can't both be right.
Like I said, glaring and irreconcilable.
LOL!
Gives new meaning to autoeroticism doesn't it?
Is that what the blonde Hilton did with the hamburger and the car at a car wash? [And no, I don’t want a video of the debauche-car-y.]
I believe Rabbi Daniel Lapin made this point in “America’s Real War” (an excellent analysis of the cultural war we are in, by the way).
Never lose hope! Don’t forget-at the end of the book, we win!
bump
Somehow we all know that they aren't. They fit so well the role of the "Innovator" as described by C.S. Lewis in "the Abolition of Man".
“Me: Oh? Well, where did the material for that singularity come from in the first place? Did Harry Potter create it with his wand? And what caused the explosion? Magical Teletubbies lighting their flatulence?
This is what you are left with.”
You shouldn’t assume everyone has the same intellectual limitations that you do. There are very pragmatic and logical theories that deal with this, backed up by experimental evidence. If you had a clue about science, you would know this. I suppose you think it’s better just to wallow in your ignorance about science and attack it with nothing but outdated dogma and outright lies from prejudiced Creationist websites. Instead of making utterly ridiculous statements, why don’t you go do a web search on “vacuum fluctuation”?
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