Dear writter W O W!!!!___i humbly thank you for the research and heart felt insite.___with love/peace/understanding....daniel....p.s.? for Dawkins-if Design is not cumulative.How did Hu-mankind get to the MOON?or too AMERICA?___? anxiety-ridden place? no,i humbly think just Quest for "simple truth",which Jack Nicolson "think,s we/you can-not handle"; and John Lenon now knows.___not after life,just simply,extension of this one,but free of Darkness/only Light{LUV}
There is a lot of man's creation of God in the author's final question, with "really is" betraying the absence of God, for the author, despite the need. I fail to see how life or the world changes to the dramatic extent implied based upon the presence or absence of God in it. I have a theory that, offered a binding coin toss to determine the existence of God (binding, that is on God, not just on human belief in God,) non-believers would gladly accept the terms wanting only to know, while believers would refuse the terms wanting only to believe.
I agree entirely with the author of this fine article. TS Eliot, in his "Four Quartets" pointed out that "Humankind cannot bear very much reality".
Denial or delusion is often a comforting way to deal with the intolerable. Our ever increasing ability to see into the future has given us the Age of Anxiety, & this has generated also an Age of New Age Fads & Superstitions.
It is only given to the few to meet death with the grace of Socrates. The rest of us can hope to be helped along the Green Mile to the death chamber by someone like the character played by Tom Hanks in that film, "Its alright, we'll look after you. You're going to be O.K."
Then the Muslim evening call to prayer erupted.... and that among those who would soon be prostrating themselves in the al-Aqsa mosque were men willing to kill and be killed for their faith. A chill ran through me."
What? Notice that slippage? In this whole article, there is one paragraph devoted to a faith followed by 1.7 billion people in the world, and even in that one paragraph, it takes only one line to connect an evening call to prayer to an act of self-destruction and terrorism.
Recognize your own prejudices, namely Islamaphobia, especially when they appear so casually, as they do here.
Ayesha: his point was it was a sublime, beautiful scene, and it's precisely that elevated power for which people are willing to kill and die. There was a paragraph about how he felt at Notre Dame, a Synagogue, and a Mosque. He's got nothing to apologize for.
I read somewhere that when Faulkner was asked about his alleged anti-Semitism he said, "Yea I'm an anti-Semite, but I hate everyone else too." This piece is written in that vein. It denounces all religions equally, and points to our preference for comfort over truth.
Great article!
For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools. Romans 1:25
Men seek because God put the knowlege of Himself in us. Like the athiest who spoke in London, On and finished his speech by saying, "Thank God for getting me through that!" The Spirit bears witness...I suggest that your Mennonite friend never really truly knew God because he would not have spent 30 trying to disprove something he already had experienced. Try asking God to show himself to you...you won't be disappointed.
If we are all to live by man's rules, whose rules do you suggest we live by? Hitler's? Stalin's? But no one ever speaks of the rivers of blood that have flowed from the mandates of the religion if Humanism!
Isaiah 53:5 But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.
But by the blood of One are we saved!
Rosemary, your comment "Try asking God to show himself to you...you won't be disappointed" is something I've heard before from religious folk in one form or another. Now I've asked god to show himself to me and he never has. I wasn't disappointed because I am strong in my atheism and knew there would be no response. So in a sense your statement is true.
The conversation that follows with religious people is always based on circular logic. The religious person makes up an excuse for why god didn't respond. Well, I didn't really ask god because if I did he would have responded is always the gist of the response. This is like the circular reasoning of AA. A true alcoholic can only stop drinking with the help of AA, and any alcoholic who really tries AA will be able to stop. Someone who is able to get their drinking under control without AA is not really an alcoholic (a term with no real medical definition). If someone does their whole AA schtick and ends up drinking again, well they weren't really doing it right or it would have worked because... and the circle is complete.
You can't use quotes from a book not all parties in a discussion agree are the immutable and infallible word of god (most recent translation mind you) to prove the existence of god. I can't write a piece of historical fiction and say "Well there are plenty of facts asserted in here that are born out by historians, so all the rest of the crazy shit must be true because the book says it is."
As to the question of whose rules we should live by, there is nowhere on earth that actually follows the laws prescribed in the bible. I can quote verses too:
Matthew 5: 18-19 "For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven."
So the laws of the old testament are all still to be followed until the end of days, and since the bible is infallible any quote you could counter with to show this to be untrue would have to be some sort of misunderstanding because a contradiction wouldn't be possible in an infallible document. So if you've ever eaten a shellfish or worn a mixed-fabric garment touching your skin then you have committed abomination. If you have ever not killed someone you knew to be a male homosexual you have broken the laws of your god. I say again that no country on earth does or ever has lived according to the rules of your bible, and none ever will. Those rules were drafted by people in a cultural milieu that has almost zero relevance today (except for those golden rule type laws that are hardly unique to judeo-christian cultures). Switching to a theocratic form of government based strictly on biblical laws would be a nightmare, and most religious people have no desire to see such a thing. Sure secular governments have done horrible things and killed many, but there are some secular governments that are much less bloodthirsty. According to a Gallup poll in 2007, 83% of Swedes consider religion to be unimportant in their lives, and they have one of the highest standards of living in the world. There are plenty of similar examples in Europe.
I feel confident saying that there's no good empirical evidence for the existence of god, and therefore no good reason to have faith in him/her/it. I hope you don't spend your whole life deluded by this thousands of years old fable that's a rehashed version of far older fables, but if it makes you happy and leaves you feeling fulfilled then more power to you.
I like the idea of faith because even in the most ignorant it is an acknowledgement of something greater than ourselves. I am sometimes jealous of the faithful because it seems like a nice way to view the universe. However, like Renahaji's allegory of the coin-toss, I would rather know than believe.
Another allegory: imagine yourself on the surface of another planet. Now, imagine how you got there. Did you construct a rocket in your mind, or did you allow for some supreme force to transport you? Either way, you are dealing with an unknown and I like to think that it is our ability to imagine beyond ourselves that provides us with a taste for the mystical.
Maybe the truth of human religious experience is like human sexual experience: We long for it but just don't really understand why. If only we could figure out a way to embrace both our "Christian body" and our sceptical mind.
Of course you understand why you long for it, or at least your body does. You long for it because it feels good and that is anathema to the religious .
I could never understand how a thinking person could begin with the assumption of a creator of the universe which, if we look at the unimaginable grandeur and complexity of all that is around us, is not an unreasonable idea, especially to a bronze age mind and extrapolate from that possibility that the assumed creator could in any way resemble any in the array of psychopathic deities that are described in what can only by suspending understanding of the concept, be referred to a holy books.