Posted on 12/23/2006 7:01:57 AM PST by Clive
This time of year makes atheists especially cranky; O Little Town of Bethlehem, played in a shopping mall, does nothing to lift the spirits of an unbeliever. But even by seasonal standards, the letters attracted by my column last week on The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, demonstrate astonishing vehemence. They leave the impression that atheists are sensitive about their non belief and easily hurt by criticism.
A friend of mine, who used to run a radio program about religion, noted recently that "militant atheists were our most intolerant and angry listeners." The atheists I've lately heard from bring such passion to their hatred of religion that they can be fairly classed as religious fanatics.
Dawkins and people like him pour ridicule on believers. But, as evolutionists, they can't credibly explain why hundreds of different civilizations across the globe have felt the need to believe in a divine force. Billions of people have accepted what Dawkins considers are stupid, easily refutable and harmful ideas. How did those beliefs evolve? Were they an evolutionary advantage?
Dawkins thinks they may be the result of a misfiring or by-product similar to the reason moths immolate themselves in candles. Over eons, moths evolved a system of navigation based on light from the moon; this still usually works, but sometimes light from a candle (or another source) fatally tricks them. In the same way, Dawkins suggests, humans evolved a system of thought that has led them astray.
Children who obey adults have a "selective advantage" in evolution. They are more likely than disobedient children to survive because they won't have to learn on their own that, for instance, crocodile- infested rivers are dangerous. "Natural selection builds child brains with a tendency to believe whatever their parents and tribal elders tell them." But this valuable quality can go wrong, allowing parents to pass on their crazy religious ideas to the young. Dawkins has more trouble explaining how, in each civilization, the first wave of parents acquires religious convictions.
Atheists (my atheists, anyway) think that if you do not accept atheism outright then you're likely to accept the Bible literally -- which hasn't been true, in the case of most Christians and Jews, for generations. One reader demands to know whether I believe human life began 6,000 years ago when God created the first man and woman. No, I don't, and I hardly know anyone who does.
Atheists are arguing against a literalism that has never been accepted by anyone who is likely even to hear of Richard Dawkins. One reader demands I ask myself why I'm so sure of my beliefs. But I'm not. In fact, my beliefs hardly deserve the word "beliefs" and I'm certainly not religious in any traditional sense. My strongest belief is that a gigantic mystery still dominates this entire realm of thought.
Dawkins, and apparently most militant atheists, don't seem even slightly interested in the fact that something almost inconceivably mysterious happened at the birth of the universe. As a result, they can bring little of interest to any conversation about the origins of life.
Last March, astronomers (working with data from a NASA satellite circling the Earth since 2001) concluded that time began 13.7 billion years ago, a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. At that instant the universe (as a New York Times writer put it) expanded "from submicroscopic to astronomical size in the blink of an eye." Why would it want to do that?
I have no idea, but we now know that at least one planet that developed in the universe, Earth, would develop elements of genetic material that would make life possible though not, of course, inevitable.
Thomas Nagel, the philosopher, recently pointed out that if we are to believe evolutionary explanations, and therefore that the necessary seed material existed at the time of the Big Bang, we have to realize that there is no scientific explanation for the existence of that material in the first place. A complete understanding of evolution would involve answering a question as complex as evolution itself: "How did such a thing come into existence?" We have done nothing but push the problem one step back.
Or, as Stephen Hawking put it, "Why does the universe go to the bother of existing?" On that point we are all ignorant -- and only a little closer to knowledge than our ancestors who believed that sacrificing a goat would bring good crops. The profound intellectual failure of atheists lies in their fundamentalist-like aversion to the words, "We don't know."
This is a bad anthropology. At least dress it up a bit by saying that "primitive" men (whom we have never seen) personified the "forces" of nature. As the old Indian in "Little Big Man" put it, you think that everything is dead, while the "primitives" thought everything was alive. Vitalism, which was an important school of philosphy at the turn of the last century, may not have been "true" but it understood ancient paganism. You seem not to.
No, it is the difference between having limits and not have limits. Islam recognizes limits; Hitler had none, save what he willed.
Apply this categorical and prepositional logic...
Morality and all of its associated ideals are rooted entirely in the presupposition some higher power defines what is correct for human behavior.
It is a bullet proof syllogism and proves true with truth tables and in categorical logic with Venn diagrams...
That's speculation. Facts, on the other hand, show that in the last century, with equal access to technology, the blood lust of atheist regimes have far outpaced those in which religion was permitted. This is both in terms of not only efficiency but philosophy as well.
A perfect example is here on a thread where a friend of a fellow freeper (a bank teller) was gunned down yesterday during a holdup. As the gunman left he yelled Merry Christmas motherf***er at the dying man!
"militant atheists were our most angry and intolerant listeners."
atheists just don't believe in a divine being. militant atheists are something different entirely; they are revolutionaries who just want the revolution to happen without the transition from theism to atheism being so slow. they're just impatient guerrilas dressed in sheeps clothing.
They think they do. Or more importantly, they hope they do.
You see, if there is no supreme being of the universe, there must necessarily be a superior one. One who is smarter, stronger, more powerful than those he has contact with. There must be one. He will be called "Master".
That is, unless he is restrained by another force, say the state. And the state makes for a very tyrannical master, indeed.
In the United States, God is a legal concept. Rights are given by God, hence the state cannot deny them. All men are equal under God; otherwise, someone will become a slave.
I'm not sure how this ties in to my previous statement. Regardless, comparing Smith & Eddy with the Jesus' disciples' IMO is apples & oranges.
As mentioned previously, history is replete with madmen & charlatans. However, if the disciples of Christ were all party to a hoax, it does not seem reasonable that cutoff and isolated they would all to a man, hold to the veracity of their claim.
Again, if it were one, two, or even half of them holding on - and the other recanting - that would fit the cult model. That they all held on (knowing it all to be a hoax) is not reasonable.
And don't miss the most salient point of all; not only did they hold true, but managed to begin a movement that managed to affect the world as no other idea has...
Please show those proofs, because it doesn't look like a syllogism, much less a bullet-proof argument.
Do them yourself. It only takes one side of a sheet of paper and is very easy.
"...to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them... that all men are created... Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world... with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence..."
IOW, you can't support your statement. Thanks.
Or a fictitious character in a morality story...
Yes, and here we are discussing it 2000 years later. Quite a story - wouldn't you agree.
Is there one other single event in history that gets as much attention?
(makes one wonder if there might be something to it...)
People were discussing the travails of Isis and Osiris for several thousand years too. Does that lend credence to those tales?
Can you name another person who has so profoundly influenced tha affairs of man-kind?
Well, Mohammed, and to a lesser extent Buddha. And that Princip fellow who shot Archduke Ferdinand is pretty much singularly responsible for the current geo-political situation...
It supports itself...
I spent most of my adult life agreeing with that statement. But it's a delusion.
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