The more I learn about the world, the more I'm convinced religion is the cause of much of our problems. Not only does it divide us, but it forces us to behave in irrational ways.
I've been reading a lot of noted atheist Sam Harris' work recently, and thought I'd share a good bit from his Letter to a Christian Nation. It's the kind of book no Christian could ever take to heart or even take seriously. Harris' conclusions can't help but sound condescending, and though it's ostensibly written for a Christian audience, it reads more like ammunition for atheists. But like everything Harris writes, it is a serious piece of thinking.
If you haven't had the patience to read through his brilliant and wonderfully civil discussion with Andrew Sullivan, check out this mismatched debate with Pastor Rick Warren that ran in Newsweek earlier this month. Or his simple debunking of the logic behind Pascal's wager. (Even better, check out www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com, which explores God's peculiar spurning of amputees who pray for Him to regenerate their lost limbs.)
In this excerpt from Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris deals with the age-old problem of theodicy (how can God be both omniscient and omnipotent and not be responsible for human suffering) to arrive at the sensible notion the biblical God is fictional:
If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. You may now be tempted to execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by human standards of morality. But we have seen that human standards of morality are precisely what you use to establish God's goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern Himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which He is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that.
There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction, like Zeus and the thousands of other dead gods whom most sane human beings now ignore. Can you prove that Zeus does not exist? Of course not. And yet, just imagine if we lived in a society where people spent tens of billions of dollars of their personal income each year propitiating the gods of Mount Olympus, where the government spent billions more in tax dollars to support institutions devoted to these gods, where untold billions more in tax subsidies were given to pagan temples, where elected officials did their best to impede medical research out of deference to The Illiad and The Odyssey, and where every debate about public policy was subverted to the whims of ancient authors who wrote well, but who didn't know enough about the nature of reality to keep their excrement out of their food. This would be a horrific misappropriation of our material, moral, and intellectual resources. And yet that is exactly the society we are living in.
4 comments:
Your current post brings to mind one of my favourite Greek authors, Nikos Dimou, who happens to share quite similar views with Sam Harris.
Up until recently Nikos Dimou had had the most successful blog in Greece with hundreds of comments every day among which some were mine. Unfortunately, disgusted by the hideous verbal attacks against him and his commentators from people who strongly abhor his rational thoughts, which by the way are not very popular in besotted by the "glorious" past Greece, he shut it down few days ago.
Nikos Dimou, a fan of rational thinking and, in his works has always been critical of the increasing nationalism in Greek society and especially of the extremely conservative and simultaneously secular Greek Orthodox Church which passionately wants to be identified by its flock with the nation and play a pivotal role in the modern state.
He's written various texts on religion which i suppose you would have liked if you understood Greek. For instance, his favourite character of the bible is the criminal hanging on the cross near Jesus who asked him "Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us". He doesn't extol him because he is blasphemous unlike the other criminal who was fearful of God, but because he was a pragmatist who expressed a reasonable and according to human standards doubt.To him, the criminal isn't punished on account of refusing god's existence -on the contrary he would say- but because he is "disrespectful" enough to think the way human beings are programmed to think, that is to say logically.
Unfortunately, most of his articles and especially those referring to religious matters are written in Greek, nevertheless if you don't bother you might find it interesting if you skimmed quickly some of his English pieces of writing.
From now on your blog goes to mi link list, because, even though im not familiar with most of your topics, i happen to like it.
oops, I missed to give you the link to Nikos Site
I hope it's not all Chinese to you
Thanks for the interest, the info and the link, g.a.ng. But I fear the Greek language is waay out of my league. Most Americans can hardly read and write English.
I do, however, enjoy Jennifer Aniston and John Stamos. And New Jersey, where I live, has more Greek diners (wonderfully greasy restaurants) than just about anywhere in the country.
"But I fear the Greek language is waay out of my league"
The second link I gave you is in. English!
Oh sorry, I forgot, you re an American ;-)
Well i like jennifer, not because she is half Greek but because Friends is one of my favourite series.
As far as Stamos is concerned, to be honest, i prefer his ex wife Rebecca Romijn-Stamos!
Aniston is quite popular in Greece because of Friends, nevertheless i'm not sure too many people remember Stamos from Full House.
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