The Barbarians Go South Again

Here is an article in Newsweek concerning a recent wave of prominent thinkers plugging atheism:

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The authors focused on there are Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. Apparently it was written because all these guys are publishing their arguments at the same time. What irritates me, however - what irritates me enough to interrupt the work I should be doing - is how juvenile their notions of religion and God are. Without exception, they speak as if Christianity were on the same par as superstition: God is this vindictive old guy with a white beard who sits in heaven and makes us suck up to Him. (The last bit is Dawkins's phrase, not mine, and I think all the others mentioned in the article would agree.)

Harris is explicitly mentioned as taking up a literal reading of the Bible, which doesn't speak well of him. By this stance Harris implies that any non-panliteral interpretation is just hedging. But clearly there's a lack of sensitivity to the text. I see no reason why it must be taken completely literally or metaphorically, and there are no reasons given in the article for any particular reading.

I get the feeling that most arguments against the validity of the Bible come from people who are very uninformed about the Good Book, reading it selectively, partially, or not at all.

The same questions are posed. If there's a God, how can there be evil in the world? Really, this question presupposes a lot; it's a loaded question, in fact, which is why I dislike it. Presumably God would not allow disasters, either natural or man-made, because He's so gosh-darn good. But because these do occur - well, how could there be a God? So goes the reasoning.

I don't know about you, but when I was younger, there were a lot of things I didn't understand about my parents. If they didn't think or act as I would've liked them to, they were idiots. And they were idiots because their actions didn't make sense to me. Looking back, though, I see they had good reasons for what they did. I can't say I think everything they did was perfect, but I can see why they acted as they did, and in a lot of cases - dare I say it? - it's a good thing they didn't do what I wanted.

Now, if it's so easy to understand that fact, why isn't it so easy to see it in religious thinking? Maybe God knows something we don't? - what a concept! Maybe God doesn't have to play by our rules. Indeed, why should He? I'm not saying I can sit back and cheerfully watch all the hell on earth around us today, like some Dr. Pangloss, only that the combined intellect of those atheists - the combined intellect of the human species, for that matter - is pretty paltry when held up against the wisdom of God.

Another bit that annoys me is when they say that believers get their ideas out of a book:

They ask: where do people get their idea of God? From the Bible or the Qur'an. "Tell a devout Christian ... that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible," Harris writes, "and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever."

Granted, some people do have a notion of religion this simplistic and sheeply. But for anyone who has a sense of religiousness at all, they know this is not the case. The question of where people get their idea of God is another loaded one; in fact it's not even the question it claims to be. What the atheists imply is that religion is purely a textual matter - if it weren't for the Bible or the Qur'an, we wouldn't be religious. Don't believe me? Check it out: the book by my bed "was written by an invisible deity"! Human beings could not have written it out of a response to some phenomenon, no-siree Bob. Religious experience doesn't exist, and if it did it would obviously be chalked up as delusional.

The question "Where do people get their idea of God?" deals more with how our thinking about God has been conditioned, not with the original source of the idea.

What we find here, then, is a position that is unassailable - unbeatable because it refuses to fight. Walled itself up in its own circle of logic, it is impenetrable. Kind of like conspiracy theories.

What I find most striking about the so-called debate is how much religious thinkers have developed over the years, and how little the atheists have come along. They marshall up the same tired questions, the same evidence, and draw the same conclusions. If this were a real debate, they might listen to the opposing side and learn something from them, if only in an attempt to convince them of the error of their ways.

But they don't, and that's telling. What it tells me is that they have simply ignored religious thought, preferring the sanctuary of their own fantasy-image to actual research. If they had, the article mentioned above would probably have included new material, new questions, new refutations. There isn't any of this.

Is this what passes for enlightened thinking? Is this what's called progress? Looks more like regress to me.

(Image brashly cribbed from www.nivbed.com/junk/ancient_garbage/)