Well, I’m reading the books I received for Giftmas. It takes some time to get through them in 2 minute intervals twice daily, but I just finished the first and I am halfway through the second.
The first book was The End of Faith by Sam Harris. In this book, Harris warns of the dangers of clinging to dogma as the world’s people’s ability to destroy themselves over questions of which imagined deity is the correct one increases. He starts by pointing out that some religions are notably worse than others, but that all religious belief is dangerous to humanity even those of the moderate and liberal believer.
The second is another Sam Harris book entitled Letter to a Christian Nation. He has written this book in the context of a letter to a christian in the American right. I know I should not quote too much of any book, but here is an excerpt that I just read from Letter to a Christian Nation (p. 50-57).
The Goodness of God
Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this type is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings.The same statistics also suggest that this girls parent’s believe–as you believe–that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?
No.
The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a “non-astrologer” or a “non-alchemist.” We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. An atheist is simple a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to “never doubt the existence of God” should be obliged to present evidence for his existence–and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day. An atheist is a person who believes that the murder of a single little girl–even once in a million years–cast doubt upon the idea of a benevolent God.
. . .
Hurricane Katrina
. . . It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God’s grace.
It is time we recognize the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. It is time we acknowledge how disgraceful it is for the survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Once you stop swaddling the reality of the world’s suffering in religious fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is–and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgments of their happiness for no good reason at all.
One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the world’s faith. The Holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide in Rwanda, even with machete-wielding priests among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died of small pox in the twentieth century, many of them infants. God’s ways are, indeed, inscrutable. It seems that any fact, no matter how infelicitous, can be rendered compatible with religious faith.
Of course, people of all faiths regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God therefor 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 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 Iliad 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 horrible misappropriation of our material, moral, and intellectual resources. And yet that is exactly the society we are living in. This is the woeful and irrational world that you and your fellow Christians are working tirelessly to create.
It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of the suffering can be directly attributed to religion–to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious taboos, and religious diversions of scarce resources–is what makes the honest criticism of religious faith a moral and intellectual necessity. Unfortunately, expressing such criticism places the non-believer at the margins of society. By merely being in touch with reality, he appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.
What I find so refreshing about reading his and Dawkin’s books is the complete honesty in which they make their statements. No effort is made to sugar coat the obvious fact that god is imaginary and that belief in god and religious dogma makes the world a dangerous place for believers and also for those of us who are reasonable.
These books are very interesting to read. I recommend that everyone read them.
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