In today’s NY Times, author Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason; Letter to a Christian Nation):
By shying away from questioning people’s deeply felt beliefs, even the skeptics, Mr. Harris said, are providing safe harbor for ideas that are at best mistaken and at worst dangerous. “I don’t know how many more engineers and architects need to fly planes into our buildings before we realize that this is not merely a matter of lack of education or economic despair,” he said.
Dr. Steven Weinberg, who famously wrote toward the end of his 1977 book on cosmology, “The First Three Minutes,” that “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless,” went a step further: “Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”
True, it is “not merely a matter of lack of education,” though I wonder about the secularists so uneducated on faith matters. Why are these anti-religion activists content to broad-brush the world’s religions? Do they believe all atheists and secularists act the same, all in a clear-headed, beneficent manner? Have we forgotten the motives of the murderous leaders from the twentieth century? [via Books, Inq.]
This sort of thing really does disgust me. You have these people setting out to learn from our mistakes as Christians (well, on a greater extent, our mistakes as religionists or the faithful), but they end up being just as prejiduced and prone to lumping as any Christian I’ve ever known.
I’ve asked several outspoken/evangelical atheists this question and never gotten much of an answer… why would I want to become some angry person who defines my beliefs in opposition to other people? What’s so great about trolling Christian sites and starting 101Biblecontradictions.com style websites?
They’re not saving my soul, so why do they have to bother me?
Yeah. As with Weinberg, who was quoted saying the universe is pointless, why does someone need to argue or campaign for pointlessness? That’s the same contradiction Zarathustra makes in Nietzsche’s parable. If nothing is true, how can the lies hurt anyone? But I’m sure they don’t believe nothing is true. They believe they are autonomous, that they are gods accountable to no one. Anything that can be argued to support that premise is acceptable.
Harris is a phoney. Has he never heard of the 200 million deaths caused by communism (ie. materialism, atheism)in the last century? The hypocricy he sets out is mind boggling. Why isn’t he worried about the negative effects of atheism? (A story suppressed by our left wing teachers.) Only the naive are impressed by this juvenile finger pointing.
– what most irritates me about these anti-christian diatribes is the intellectual dishonesty. The arguments against materialism are legion. If materialism were true; they couldn’t know anything. What can chemicals in a bowl of bone know about anything? (Needless to say, but chemicals aren’t personal, intelligent, or self-conscious.)If all is matter free will doesn’t exist. etc.(I could bore everyone by going on and on.) People like harris (in their efforts to deceive ignorant people) just ignore these arguments. (Like R. Dawkins who claims he doesn’t consider arguments against determinism, as they’re outside his area of interest. How convenient!)