deadbeat and everyone, Here's some fine writing on the subject of atheism. They're up to number 21 and counting. Enjoy!

The end of god-1: The death of the three classical gods.

By Mano Singham

God is still dead. More than a hundred years after the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put those famous words "God is dead" into the mouth of one of his characters, implying that the Christian concept of god had become untenable, this statement has become even more true, the point driven home with new evidence from science and relentless logic by the advocates of the so-called 'new atheism'.

Much attention has been paid to the arguments made by the new atheists who have forcefully pointed out that not only are the evidentiary and intellectual foundations for the existence of god and the afterlife weak and shallow, but that religion is itself more of a force for evil than good in the world, either actively so or as an enabler. This group, whose public faces are Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger, and Sam Harris, have managed to bring these arguments to the forefront of the public debate.

The basic issue can be identified by the answers to two fundamental questions:

Is there any credible reason to think that god exists in any form? The answer is no.

Even if god is a fiction, does the concept have a net positive utilitarian value that makes it worth preserving? The answer is no.

The next series of posts will flesh out the developments since Nietzsche's time that have provided a more empirical basis for his conclusion.

To anticipate a common objection, it is perhaps necessary to first acknowledge that it is logically impossible to disprove the existence of a god whose properties are carefully defined so as to avoid detection, so believers can always seek refuge in the tiny loophole that logic provides them. But what has become increasingly clear is that to believe in god today is to make a willful decision to go against reason and evidence, and is clearly an irrational act.

The many powerful arguments against the existence of god and in favor of atheism have been around for a long time, going all the way back to the ancient Greek philosophers. (See my series of posts on the history of western atheism). So what exactly is new about the new atheism that has given it so much force that has enabled it to achieve such prominence?

To answer that question we need to look at the kinds of arguments advanced in favor of the existence of god. There are three different kinds of arguments, each one implying the existence of a different kind of god. In discussing with religious people about the existence of god, it is important to first clarify which god they are arguing in favor of because otherwise, as I will discuss later, religious apologists tend to slide from one god to another, making a coherent discussion difficult.

Most of the arguments put forward by most religious people are in favor of the 'Personal God' theory. By pointing to admirable people who happened to be religious and arguing that they were directly influenced by god, by giving personal testimonies of experiencing the presence of god in their lives, by suggesting that singular events (alleged miracles) show god's existence by violating natural laws, appealing to the historical validity of religious texts, arguing that without god there would be no basis for morality or no explanation for altruism, etc., such arguments advance the idea of a peripatetic god who is always active everywhere, listening to each and every person, and responding to some of their prayers. The Personal God is credited with many good things that occur and although allegedly omnipotent, is curiously and inexplicably passive about preventing the many evils that occur on a daily basis.

A subset of Christian believers in the Personal God also believe in the literal truth of the Bible, that the Earth is 6,000 or so years old, that Adam and Eve were real people, that Noah's flood was a historical event, and so on.

The existence of another kind of god (the 'Ultimate Creator God') depends on the argument that it seems reasonable to suppose that for every complex thing in existence, one needs an even more complex thing to design it and bring it into being. Since many aspects of the world are complex, one could extend this argument up a ladder of ever increasingly complex designers and creators to assert that one needs an ultimate grand designer and creator, which is this particular god.

The third god (the 'God of the Gaps') is almost identical to the Ultimate Creator God conceptually, but instead of invoking a chain of causality ending up with god as a prime designer and creator, takes a more direct route by pointing to specific things in nature (such as the human eye, the wings of birds, etc.) that seem (to these believers at least) far too complex to have come about by natural laws and processes, these believers assert that these are exceptions to natural laws and required direct creation by god. In other words, god is not simply an ultimate explanation for all things but is instead an immediate and direct cause for the existence of many things, though far more selective in intervening in worldly affairs than the Personal God. The God of the Gaps is invoked to directly explain the existence of the hitherto otherwise unexplained.

The three kinds of god suggested by these arguments imply very different properties.

The Ultimate Creator God is one who is very hands-off. After initially carefully creating the universe and its laws with the goal of bringing the present form of life into being, he (for the sake of convenience I am going to treat god as being male) is assumed to leave things strictly alone. It is assumed that the Ultimate Creator God wanted, for some reason, to have humans in their present form eventually emerge from the initial cosmic soup, and thus had to carefully fine-tune the laws and initial conditions so that billions of years later conditions would be just right so that this is exactly what would happen. This is actually quite an incredible feat of planning and reverse engineering, but this is god we are talking about so this task is presumably a piece of cake for him.

The God of the Gaps has either inferior engineering skills to the Ultimate Creator God or is one of those perennial tinkerers who is never content with the original plans and ideas and keeps changing things as they go along. Either his initial plans had glitches that failed to produce important developments like the eye or the wings of birds and he had to step in and create them fresh, or such things were not in the initial plans at all and after observing his animal creations crashing into each other, this god suddenly had the brainwave that eyes would be a good eye and retrofitted them.

The Personal God seems to be the most inept of the three, a busybody who is constantly interfering in each and every person's life whether they want it or not. This god is the ultimate micromanager, never sticking to a plan but always stepping in to change things, violating his own rules if need be to achieve some immediate end, answering some prayers while ignoring others, preventing some bad things from happening while allowing colossal evils elsewhere, and creating such disorder and anarchy that it is hopeless to expect to find any pattern or reason in his behavior. As a result, many people just declare his intentions to be inscrutable, surrender their freedom and autonomy to him, and pray for him to tell them what to do about everything. Curiously, it is this seemingly most inept god of the three that most religious people seem to find appealing.

The end of god-2: The death of the Personal God and the God of the Gaps.

By Mano Singham

In the previous post, I discussed the three theories of god: Personal God, God of the Gaps, and Ultimate Creator God. Here the discussion continues.

The arguments advanced in favor of the Personal God theory have little intellectual merit and are proffered as evidence only by those who already want to believe. People who believe in such a god are in the grip of powerful emotions and are not going to be swayed by rational arguments. People who argue in favor of such a god or believe in the literal truth of the Bible have essentially declared that they are rejecting science and logic and reason as the basis of their belief.

The Personal God causes all kinds of problems for rationality. It is not a serious theory and sophisticated theologians, who appreciate that the idea of an activist, interventionist god creates more theological problems than it solves, tend to dismiss it. Thus we can consider this god to be dead as a serious intellectual proposition, although it is still believed in by a large number of people. I am not going to spend much time arguing against the existence of the Personal God because people who believe in such a god are not doing so on the basis of any argument and hence arguments against this god will have no effect. For example, how can you argue with someone who says that she had a vision in which god spoke to her or a near death experience where she visited heaven?

What about the arguments for the Ultimate Creator God and the God of the Gaps?

The arguments in favor of these two gods (which I discussed in an earlier post) do have some intellectual merit and the more sophisticated religious apologists use them to underpin their faith. These arguments have been the foundation of religious apologists starting from ancient days, through Bishop Paley's watchmaker analogy, down to the current intelligent design creationism. While these arguments are by no means conclusive, for a long time there did not exist any credible alternative models or theories or conclusive arguments or evidence to refute them. Hence these arguments by religious apologists for the existence of god were tenable (at least in principle) and thus seemed plausible enough to be held on to without seeming to be irrational. Atheists always had the option of rejecting them as sterile explanations without any content and while many did so, they were not able to refute them.

That is no longer the case. There is no question that we now have powerful new arguments against the existence of the Ultimate Creator God and the God of the Gaps that were not available to the earlier generations of atheists. They arise from the rapid advance of modern science.

The most obvious casualty of these advances in science has been the God of the Gaps. Those things that were once thought to be so amazingly complex that they could not possibly have come about by natural causes (the eye, wings, the colors of butterflies, etc.) are now routinely explained by biological theories and their origins and workings are no longer deeply mysterious, though these things are still marvelous and awe-inspiring to behold. The gaps where this god resided have become increasingly narrow and is so threatened with extinction that more sophisticated theologians have abandoned this god because of the embarrassment it causes. In any high-level discussion involving the existence of god (see for example The God Delusion Debate between Richard Dawkins and John Lennox), it is quite common for religious apologists (Lennox in this case) to start with a disclaimer that the god they believe in is not a God of the Gaps, since they know that advances in scientific understanding have made such a god an endangered species.

But although formally disclaiming such a god, some still try to sneak it in under a different name. Intelligent design creationism, by suggesting that certain microbiological phenomena are too unlikely to have occurred by the laws of biology and thus must have been created by a designer, is invoking a God of the Gaps, even if the gap it appeals to is so tiny.

But given that sophisticated religious apologists are shying away from admitting to a belief in a God of the Gaps, we can assume that that god, like the Personal God, is also dead, at least as a serious proposition worth debating, although it still has some believers.

The demise of the Personal God and the God of the Gaps as viable candidates leaves standing just the Ultimate Creator God. But as I shall show, here too significant new developments in the theories of evolution and cosmology have dealt devastating blows to its credibility and it is these developments that have laid the intellectual foundations for the powerful arguments of the new atheists, arguments that were not available to earlier generations of atheists. From: http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/subject/...religion?page=1

This is the best, most clear and extensive writing on this subject I have seen on the Internet. With historical background, impeccable research, lucid writing and unassailable logic, the end of God is near! (())

Here's my second installment, with numbers 3 and 4 of Mano Singham's masterful writing.

The end of god-3: The death of the Ultimate Creator God.

By Mano Singham

With the arrival of Darwin's theory, it was possible to understand how life systems could evolve from simple forms to more complex forms under the dynamic of natural laws. This dealt a serious blow to the Ultimate Creator God.

In the previous post, we saw that the idea of the Personal God was dead on the grounds that believing in such a god required one to abandon rationality and the God of the Gaps was dead on the grounds that advances in science have successively closed so many of the gaps that believing in such a god has become somewhat of an embarrassing exercise, requiring one to find refuge in a new gap whenever an old one gets explained by science. The decreasing number of credible gaps has resulted in most religious apologists abandoning this god as unworkable.

This left only the Ultimate Creator God, with its underlying assumption that complex things required a more complex creator, as a viable hypothesis.

Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, arriving in the mid-nineteenth century, was the first major scientific theory that destroyed the need for both the God of the Gaps and an Ultimate Creator God when it came to life's complex systems. In its more modern form of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, which incorporates genetics and molecular biology into natural selection, this theory shows that once a replicator that is capable of reproducing or copying itself with fairly high fidelity using the raw materials available to it in its environment comes into being, however simple and primitive it might be, it will be inexorably driven by the laws of natural selection to ever more complex forms of replicators (the DNA molecule being one example of a complex replicator), eventually resulting in the complexity and diversity of life that we now see all around us. (See Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene for a clear explanation of how that happens.)

Thus with the arrival of Darwin's theory, it was possible to understand how life systems could evolve from simple forms to more complex forms under the dynamic of natural laws. This dealt a serious blow to the Ultimate Creator God.

This major advance in our ability to understand the existence of life's complexity and diversity without invoking a designer was followed by modern cosmological theories, developed in the mid-twentieth century, that have shown a similar process at work in the non-living world. We are now beginning to understand how a universe that began as a simple soup of quarks and gluons became, over time and under the influence of natural laws, the vast and complex universe of stars and galaxies that we now have. This growth from simplicity to complexity was again driven by purely natural laws acting on purely material elements without any need to invoke some kind of external intelligence supervising and managing the process.

I am by no means asserting that every question concerning life and the universe has been answered. What I am saying is that we now have powerful new theories that are evidence-based and provide a framework for investigating and ultimately answering the fundamental question of how complexity can arise.

Thus the modern twin theories of the neo-Darwinian synthesis and big-bang cosmology are now available to convincingly destroy the chief argument of religious apologists for the existence of the Ultimate Creator God, that there was no credible alternative to postulating that there needed to be an ultimate creator to bring about complexity

This is knowledge that earlier atheist philosophers did not have but could only hope to one day attain. As Richard Dawkins said, "An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: "I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one." I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist." (The Blind Watchmaker, page 6)

Hume's hope has now become reality. We now have very good scientific explanations for such questions and it is the scientists among the new atheists, such as Dawkins in the field of biology, Victor Stenger in the field of physics and cosmology, and Daniel Dennett in the fields of the mind and consciousness that have made the case for the death of the Ultimate Creator God most forcefully.

Of course, it has to be conceded that religious believers can still claim that since science has not as yet convincingly demonstrated how the big bang or how the very first primitive replicator came about (although some speculative solutions have been proposed for both those problems), that it is at least logically possible to attribute these two things to a god. So in a sense, scientific developments have forced religious apologists into a corner and required them to merge the God of the Gaps and the Ultimate Creator God into one, into a kind of God of the Ultimate Gaps, this god serving purely as a sterile answer to questions about the origin of the universe and the origin of life.

This God of the Ultimate Gaps is one who has acted only twice in the entire history of our universe, the first time to start the universe and the second and last time to create the first replicator, before handing in his retirement papers for good. While religious believers can claim, if they wish, that such a limited-action god is logically possible, such an austere and remote god is a far cry from the chummy Personal God favored by most religious believers. Trying to bridge the gap between the God of the Ultimate Gaps favored by sophisticated theologians and the Personal God favored by the general public has been a thorny problem for the religious community.

The plain fact is that science, while it cannot totally eliminate god as a logical possibility, has for all intents and purposes made god redundant.

The end of god-4: The death of god due to other causes.

By Mano Singham

While developments in science have provided the most powerful arguments against the existence of god in any form, it is not only science that has led to the undermining of traditional religious beliefs. As far as Christianity and Judaism are concerned, other areas of scholarly work, such as modern textual scholarship in the form of the so-called 'higher criticism', coupled with careful archeological studies, have shown that the Bible is very much a human-created document and that there is little or no evidence for the validity of any of the knowledge contained in it.

It now seems clear that almost the entire history presented in the Bible (such as the stories of Abraham, Moses, the captivity and exodus from Egypt, David, Solomon, etc.), right up to the period when the Israelites were taken into exile by the Persians in about 650 BCE, is fiction. The present day Bible has been shown to be essentially a political document written in the centuries between 400 BCE and 100 CE, and consists of the codification of documents produced by priests beginning around 650 BCE, very long after almost all the events it purportedly claims to record. (See my earlier series of posts on this topic.)

Even for events reported in the New Testament, the evidence is very weak that some person named Jesus lived at the appropriate time claimed by Christians and, even if he did exist, there is no credible evidence for the claims of his followers about his virgin birth, resurrection, miracles, and other supposed clues to his divinity.

The idea that the Bible or the Koran or any other religious text is divinely inspired is hard to sustain. Religious people can and do cherry-pick passages from them to suggest that they contain information that could only have come from a divine entity but these arguments are laughably inadequate.

For example, at a recent science-religion program sponsored by the Campus Freethought Alliance held at Case, a religious panelist suggested that the Bible must be true since it predicted some things that came to pass later. But the examples he gave were weak, consisting mainly of things that Jesus said or did that were supposedly predicted by the Old Testament prophets. This is the kind of argument that will only satisfy the already devout because even the Bible itself says that Jesus had studied the scriptures and actively sought to satisfy the prophecies. Thus the Bible itself undermined the speaker's case but he seemed to be unaware of this implication.

This willingness of believers to suspend rational analysis when it comes to their own beliefs is widely prevalent. Recently two young Mormon missionaries came to my home to try and convert me. They told me the story of Joseph Smith and his Book of Mormon based on the golden plates that he supposedly discovered and which subsequently disappeared again after he had translated them using the magic stones. When I asked them why I should believe the writings in their holy book, they told me that it made predictions that had come true. When I asked them to name one, they said that the book had predicted Columbus's voyage to America. When I pointed out that Joseph Smith lived in the 19th century, long after that voyage, and that this could hardly be considered a prediction, they said that Golden Plates had been created long before Columbus. When I asked them how they knew this, they said that Joseph Smith had said so!

These Mormon missionaries were young, articulate, and seemingly intelligent people. The fact that they did not seem to realize that they were arguing in a circle and basically claiming authority for a text on the basis of nothing other than the claims of that same text shows just how much religion subverts people's most basic reasoning skills. I see the same thing with Christians who try to convince me about the reality of Jesus and god by quoting passages from the Bible. It does not seem to strike them that this makes little sense.

Even on the most basic of facts, the Bible falls short. For example, 1 Kings 7:23-26 and 2 Chronicles 4:2-5 gives the value of pi (as the ratio of circumference to diameter) as 3. As Sam Harris points out in his Letter to a Christian Nation (p. 61), "But the Egyptians and Babylonians both approximated pi to a few decimal places several centuries before the oldest books of the Bible were written. The Bible offers us an approximation that is terrible even by the standards of the ancient world." In other words, even by the standards of knowledge available elsewhere at that time, the Bible got it hopelessly wrong.

As for making predictions, the Bible is simply terrible. It makes no predictions worthy of the name. As Harris says, "If the Bible were such a book [of prophecy], it would make perfectly accurate predictions about human events. You would expect it to contain a passage such as "In the latter half of the twentieth century, humankind will develop a globally linked system of computers -- the principles of which I set forth in Leviticus -- and this system shall be called the Internet." The Bible contains nothing like this. In fact, it does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century." (Harris, p. 60, my italics)

The idea that the Bible (or the Koran) can form the basis of a moral life has also come under serious attack because the morality that is espoused in it can only be described as appalling. It is all too easy to find passages that indicate god's approval of slavery, prostitution, genocide, and rape, and to find punishment by death being advocated for such absurdities as working on the Sabbath, wearing garments made of different threads, planting different crops side by side, showing disrespect for parents, or for sundry sexual transgressions. As Richard Dawkins says in his narration in the British television documentary The Root of All Evil, "The god of the old testament has got to be the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Jealous and proud of it, petty, vindictive, unjust, unforgiving, racist, an ethnic cleanser, urging his people on to acts of genocide."

Thus the Bible has an awful record when it comes to history, mathematics, science, morality, and predictions.

The problem for religious people of how to deal with theodicy (why a loving all-powerful god can allow evil to occur) is also one that will not go away, however much religious people might try to paper over its problems. How can anyone contemplate the unspeakable atrocities committed during the Holocaust, the Vietnam war, the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda and of Native Americans, slavery, (the list can go on almost indefinitely) and still believe in a kind and loving and providential god?

All these problems are well known to religious scholars but are not raised so much among the general public. And for a long time, the dubious argument of showing 'respect for religion' prevented even non-religious people from pointing out forcefully all these obvious weaknesses of religion, and that religious texts had had no scientific or historical or moral validity and should be viewed as little more than fiction.

But that has changed. The new atheists have not hesitated to highlight all these weaknesses of religion that have come to the fore because of advances in science and other disciplines.

From: http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/subject/...religion?page=1

Here is the next series in the saga, "The End of God!"

The end of god-5: The politics of 'good' and 'bad' religion.

By Mano Singham

Perhaps the biggest storm raised by the new atheists, and which has even caused a split within the atheist community about strategy, is that they have decided to ignore the polite fiction that there is 'good' religion and there is 'bad' religion. Supporters of this split (which includes even many non-religious people) believe that what should be done is to support the good religionists by aligning with them to combat the bad.

This has to be understood as being essentially a political strategy, designed to marginalize the so-called religious extremists and fundamentalists, the people whose religious beliefs lead them to reject all of modern science and to harbor repugnant views on issues of morality and social justice.

But while this strategy may generate some political benefits in the short term, its adoption has also resulted in religious beliefs as a whole being treated with kid gloves, by not subjecting them to the same close and withering scrutiny that is applied to other evidence-defying beliefs such as astrology and witchcraft. Although religious beliefs are as irrational as any of those things, this political strategy required that this inconvenient truth not be pointed out, and to maintain the façade that there is a 'true' religion which is essentially good, and that the evils committed in religion's name arise from distortions of the true religion by misguided or evil people.

This gentle treatment of mainstream religion was no doubt aided by the fact that many people that atheists were likely to know, even within their close circle of family and friends, are people who are otherwise rational and yet also believe in these religion-related absurdities. It is hard to criticize religion in a fundamental way without implicitly suggesting that belief in it is an irrational act. The desire not to ruffle feathers serves to muffle fundamental criticisms of religion as a whole and resulted in many atheists of previous generations carefully tailoring their arguments to only condemn those whose religion resulted in abhorrent views and actions. The views of such people were said to not represent 'true' religion, though why that is so is never made clear.

It is undoubtedly true that there are very many religious people who are decent and humane, even inspirational. It is also true that there are very many religious people who are bigoted, racist, and murderous. But the idea that the good that some religious people do is evidence of a loving god at work while the evil that other religious people do is not evidence of a vicious and hateful god is an argument that is highly self-serving and lacks coherence.

Take for example, evangelical (and John McCain supporter) John Hagee, who explains some of his beliefs below:

(This was a YouTube window and my browser wouldn't open or identify it. Let this link suffice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYG4rq-RMho ) photojack.

He quotes the Bible to justify his weird views and who has the standing to say he is wrong in his understanding? 'Good' religious believers have the unenviable task of trying to explain why their choice of Biblical passages and their interpretation should be given more weight than Hagee's. (For more of Hagee's ravings, courtesy of Matt Taibbi's new book The Great Derangement, see this excerpt (courtesy of Tbogg).)

The argument of mainstream religions that 'true' religion (i.e., the religious doctrines that they happen to subscribe to) is a force for good simply cannot be sustained. What the new atheists are saying is that rather than there being bad and good religion, there is only bad religion (that which makes people commit acts that go against accepted standards of morality and decency and justice) and the enabling of bad religion. After all, those religious extremists who commit appalling acts in the name of religion are as justified in arguing that they represent 'true' religion as anyone else. Religious texts and the history of religion are all over the place when it comes to prescriptions for behavior and one can pick and choose passages to justify almost anything.

The very fact that the 'good' religious people feel justified in dismissing or ignoring those parts of the Bible that support evil acts shows that they are not deriving their morality from the Bible but are instead imposing a morality derived elsewhere, from secular humanist values, onto the Bible.

The new atheists have a far more consistent argument. They say that it is far more coherent to argue that there is no god at all, that it is pointless to ascribe the actions of people to a god, and that we should reject the Bible or the Koran or any other religious text as authoritative documents in their entirety.

In their rejection of the concept of a 'good' religion worth saving or even promoting, the new atheists have split with some scientists who argue for an alliance with the followers of 'good' religion and seek to find an accommodation of science with that religion. I call this latter group of scientists 'Templeton scientists' because the Templeton Foundation has for a long time tried to woo scientists to try and find ways to make religion and belief in god compatible with science. This is, in my view, a hopeless task but by dangling huge rewards, (the annual Templeton prize is larger than the Nobel prize) the foundation has tried to lure some scientists into trying to find ways of doing so.

Those who assert that the new atheists are pursuing a bad strategy say that by taking a tack that will antagonize those people who believe in 'good' religion, they are harming the common struggle against those whose religion drives them to words and actions that are manifestly evil by almost any yardstick.

This argument reveals a misunderstanding of the basic nature of coalition politics. In a coalition, people come together on one set of issues they agree upon while staying true to their positions on other issues where they could well differ strongly. So it should be quite possible for the 'good religion' group to join forces with the new atheists to combat the bad social and political influence of the 'bad religion' group, while at the same time disagreeing with each other as to whether the concept of 'good religion' is valid at all.

Asking the new atheists to not debunk the concept of 'good religion' for the sake of political expediency makes as little sense as asking the members of the 'good religion' group to stop talking about their belief in god in order to avoid offending atheists. Each group should come into the coalition for the sake of an articulated common good (in this case combating the immediate and manifest evils of 'bad' religion) while retaining the right to disagree on other issues.

The reason that this fairly obvious aspect of coalition politics is not understood is because for far too long, religion has been granted a privileged place in public discourse. There has been an exaggerated 'respect for religion', which has been interpreted as requiring that one should not critique those religious beliefs that are strongly and sincerely held by 'good' people. This tradition has shielded mainstream religion from the kinds of deep critiques received by other irrational belief structures, like astrology or witchcraft. Because of such criticisms, neither of those beliefs is deemed to be intellectually respectable anymore. But religion, which is no better, still retains its standing as something that reasonable and rational people can believe in.

The new atheists have ended that tradition and it is a good thing.

The end of god-6: The biggest menace of religion: faith.

By Mano Singham

The most basic problem with almost any religion is the fact that they raise 'faith', which is the irrational acceptance of things in the absence of, or even counter to, credible evidence and reason, to the level of a virtue. This is simply asking for trouble. Once you have said that you believe something just because some book says so or some inner voice tells you to do so, you have lost all standing to condemn others whose own inner voices (or the voices of their priests, rabbis, or imams) tell them to do unspeakable acts in the name of obeying god's will.

As Daniel Dennett says:

If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges -- mixed blessings, in fact -- has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties, religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.
. . .
Not just rationality and scientific progress, but just about everything else we hold dear could be laid waste by a single massively deluded "sacramental" act. True, you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps. Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things. And - this is the worst of it - religious faith can give people a sort of hyperbolic confidence, an utter unconcern about whether they might be making a mistake, that enables acts of inhumanity that would otherwise be unthinkable.

This imperviousness to reason is, I think, the property that we should most fear in religion. Other institutions or traditions may encourage a certain amount of irrationality - think of the wild abandon that is often appreciated in sports or art - but only religion demands it as a sacred duty.

In his Letter to A Christian Nation (p. 66-68) Sam Harris says:

The conflict between science and religion is reducible to simple fact of human cognition and discourse; either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe. Everyone recognizes that to rely upon "faith" to decide specific questions of historical fact is ridiculous -- that is, until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the Bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammad's conversation with the archangel Gabriel, or to any other religious dogma. It is time that we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail.

While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still has immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane.


As a footnote, Poseidon-worshippers (yes, they exist!) were incensed at Harris's apparent slight towards them. Harris adds that "Truth be told, I now receive e-mails of protest from people who claim, in all apparent earnestness, to believe that Poseidon and the other gods from Greek mythology are real." Poseidon worshippers have a point. Why should their belief be accorded any less respect than belief in Jesus or Yahweh or Allah, just because their numbers are smaller? Once you have opened the gates of such irrationality, all bets are off.

The idea that religions are fundamentally good and that those who do evil in its name are misguided and have misinterpreted their respective religious texts simply cannot be sustained. The new atheists might concede that while certain versions of religion might inspire people to do good things, the overall influence of religion is so bad that it is not worth salvaging.

Even 'good' religion is bad in that it allows the enabling of bad religion. Once you have allowed irrationality to go unchallenged, you have lost the main argument against fanatics who think that murdering and otherwise acting against commonly accepted human values is doing the work of their god. In many ways, those whom we label as 'religious fanatics' are those who have taken their religious texts and doctrines seriously, at their face value, and have obediently sought to follow them.

For example, people whose children die because they prayed for them instead of taking them to the doctor are those who took seriously their religion's claim that if they had faith, god would heal them. After all, it was Jesus who gave this promise (Mark 16:17-18):

"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."

Most mainstream religious people cynically hedge their bets by seeking medical treatment when they fall ill, in addition to praying. But according to Jesus, it is those whom we would consider to be religious fanatics, the exorcists, the hallucinators, the snake handlers, the poison drinkers, and the faith healers who should be considered truly religious.

It is precisely because religious people bring up children to believe unquestioningly in absurd religious dogmas that some of those children grow up taking such things more seriously than their parents might like. It is then disingenuous to argue that they have gone too far. The people who do evil things in the name of religion are presumably convinced that they are doing god's work. Bin Laden holds himself up as a true Muslim, upholding his religion's highest traditions. John Hagee and Pat Robertson are similarly convinced that they are the true Christians. And one can find similar examples in other religions.

The best way to counter them is to argue that there is no god and that their holy books are merely the work of human minds that carry no more intrinsic authority than today's newspaper. At least that is a position that can be backed up overwhelmingly by evidence, science, and reason.

To argue instead, as 'good' religionists try to do, that your idea of god is better than their idea of god is a proposition that is purely religious-text based and can be easily countered by pointing to different sections of the same religious texts. As such, it can never be conclusive and can be easily dismissed by those whom we usually label as 'fanatics' but are better described as 'true believers'.

From: http://www.machineslikeus.com/cms/subject/...religion?page=1

eesh, couldn't have posted a link and some snippets?