They say that without religion, we would not have the Sistine Chapel or Handel’s Messiah or the cathedral at Rouens. Well, without atheism Julia Sweeney would not have made Letting Go of God. After an hour of listening to Julia’s heartbreaking journey from devout catholic to accidental atheist, there is no need to read or write anything else about atheism or religion. Case closed.
This is the first video of thirteen. Everyone one of them is a masterpiece. Listen to it with your children.
I don’t know why but Pat Robertson is suddenly on my TV and he and his co-host are taking it in turn to say things like:
I am sensing that one of our viewers has a torn meniscus but God says it’s gonna be fine.
and
The viewer with a mass in your stomach that you think might be cancerous…you just need to pray some more and God will make it right.
I don’t know what that’s about but I just got through reading a huge thread in which two communities of atheists are arguing whether Richard Dawkins is intellectually lazy because he attacks a strawman version of religion, the hypothetical adherents of which believe in a personal God who intervenes in our lives. Apparently no one believes in that kind of God any more and Dawkins should address more sophisticated conceptions of the divine.
The accommodationist atheists also say it’s rude to point out that people like Pat Robertson might not be telling the truth.
[The argument happens way down in the comments of a post claiming that the New Atheists are right-wing, foreign policy hawks. I read it so you don't need to. ]
Whenever I read something crazy in the Times - usually by Brooks - I bookmark it with the intention to blog my reaction. I have a whole backlog of Brooks columns to comment on and half-written posts brim full of bile.
More often though, I’ll run across someone else who did better tear down than I could ever write.
First, Fish’s/Eagleton’s claim that God is not a knowable thing:
Eagleton:
For one thing, of course, God differs from Unidentified Flying Objects or the Yeti or the Tooth Fairy in not being even a possible object of cognition… it’s not just we cannot see Him, it is as it were that our not seeing him is inherent to God Himself, which is presumably not true of the Yeti.
Taibblog:
Got that? It’s not that we can’t see God — it’s that God is inherently unseen! Take that, atheists!
Second is the claim that science doesn’t have all the answers therefor we need religion.
Eagleton:
Reason dismisses faith because faith lacks the certainty of knowledge.
But, reason alone has been proven to be completely inadequate to solve the problems of the world, and has proven especially feeble at providing man with the answers to his questions about the nature of existence.
Therefore, reason was wrong about faith.
Taibblog:
The whole premise recalls Woody Allen’s famous syllogism: “Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.”
BloggingHeads.tv has captured the market in political debate where the debators actually listen to one another and address each others points. They sometimes even agree! Gasp!
I gave up listening to atheist vs believer debates a while back as they never seem to move the argument forward in any meaningful way - there are only so many times you can hear that religion gave us the Inquisition and that morality without God is not possible. I decided to risk one more encounter because I thought the Bloggingheads format might lead to a more enlightening discussion and because I enjoy reading both Ross Douthat’s and Heather MacDonald’s writings.
I was not disappointed.
Heather MacDonald was magnificent. I wish she were getting Ross’s spot on the NYT Op-ed page. It’s great that Kristol is gone and it’s great that a non-crazy, non-partisan conservative is getting his spot - but it would be sooo much more fantastic to have smart, secular conservative who does not argue in ALL CAPS in such a prominent seat.
I have never seen such polite passion as Heather’s in a debate and she has the BEST debate winning technique - if I ever go on BlogggingHeads, I am so gonna get me one of those web cams that will hyper-zoom at the most intense moments so I can go all googley-eyed on my opponent. I don’t know how Ross was able to withstand the pressure.
Ross seemed to be on his best behavior and didn’t fling any of the wild accusations that believers usually fling at non-believers.
Heather made fantastic point after fantastic point - so many I lost track. I don’t know if she had prepared notes but her soundbites could not have been better had she rehearsed them in the mirror beforehand.
Here are a few I remember:
The sermon on the mount is not necessarily a defence of unfettered capitalism.
I don’t think many of us would want to have lived during a time when the church was at the peak of its power.
Humans are endowing Christianity with values that comes from ourselves. not from God.
If you want to posit “God” as a placeholder for ignorance of the first cause, fine, but I will not grant you the Christian version of God as loving and just.
Ross did an admirable job under the googley-eyed circumstances but didn’t quite hold his own. His best defence was to fling non sequiturs whenever Heather landed a particularly powerful shot.
Ross v Heather was worth a thousand Hitchens v Mad Creationist debates. Bloggingheads FTW!
Anyone who has paid attention knows that Denmark and Sweden are among the least religious nations in the world. Polls asking about belief in God, the importance of religion in people’s lives, belief in life after death or church attendance consistently bear this out.
It is also well known that in various rankings of nations by life expectancy, child welfare, literacy, schooling, economic equality, standard of living and competitiveness, Denmark and Sweden stand in the first tier.
I actually think that it’s a better example of ceremonial deism;
The many nonbelievers he interviewed, both informally and in structured, taped and transcribed sessions, were anything but antireligious, for example. They typically balked at the label “atheist.” An overwhelming majority had in fact been baptized, and many had been confirmed or married in church.
That sounds a lot like the Church of England of my youth.
The interviewees affirmed a Christianity that seems to have everything to do with “holidays, songs, stories and food” but little to do with God or Creed, everything to do with rituals marking important passages in life but little to do with the religious meaning of those rituals.
About ten years ago, I was very taken withThe Straight Dope, and every now and then - and against my better judgment - I go back and read it for old times’ sake.
The same things about the style of debate there that used to enchant me still enchant me - where else can you read well-argued positions both for and and against Objectivism, Free Will, Thomas Aquinas and why we should cut off the baby boomers?- and the things that frustrated me still frustrate the hell out of me.
As for your second question, we must point out that, scientifically speaking, animals always do it for fun. The only critters who do it because they have to are Catholics. Take it from your Unca Cecil.
In my quest to find blogs with a political outlook different from my own, I came across Secular Right. It’s pretty good. Plenty to disagree with but without the undertone of atheists are un-american. Some of the bloggers are escapees from the National Review who don’t feel comfortable posting their secular opinions on the Corner. They lean more libertarian than most of the denizens of the Corner too.
I’ve often wondered about the attempts to either explain phenomena like conscsiousness, free will and intelligence in terms of physics, chemistry and biology. Kauffman has written a book about it and claims that
such phenomena “cannot be deduced from physics, have causal powers of their own, and therefore are emergent real entities in the universe.” This creative process of emergence, Kauffman contends, “is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe.”
Her fans seem inclined to forgive her any indiscretion short of cannibalism. However badly she may stumble during the remaining weeks of this campaign, her supporters will focus their outrage upon the journalist who caused her to break stride, upon the camera operator who happened to capture her fall, upon the television network that broadcast the good lady’s misfortune—and, above all, upon the “liberal elites” with their highfalutin assumption that, in the 21st century, only a reasonably well-educated person should be given command of our nuclear arsenal.
…
Watching her deny to Gibson that she had ever harbored the slightest doubt about her readiness to take command of the world’s only superpower, one got the feeling that Palin would gladly assume any responsibility on earth:
“Governor Palin, are you ready at this moment to perform surgery on this child’s brain?”
“Of course, Charlie. I have several boys of my own, and I’m an avid hunter.”
“But governor, this is neurosurgery, and you have no training as a surgeon of any kind.”
“That’s just the point, Charlie. The American people want change in how we make medical decisions in this country. And when faced with a challenge, you cannot blink.”
…
The prospects of a Palin administration are far more frightening, in fact, than those of a Palin Institute for Pediatric Neurosurgery. Ask yourself: how has “elitism” become a bad word in American politics? There is simply no other walk of life in which extraordinary talent and rigorous training are denigrated. We want elite pilots to fly our planes, elite troops to undertake our most critical missions, elite athletes to represent us in competition and elite scientists to devote the most productive years of their lives to curing our diseases. And yet, when it comes time to vest people with even greater responsibilities, we consider it a virtue to shun any and all standards of excellence. When it comes to choosing the people whose thoughts and actions will decide the fates of millions, then we suddenly want someone just like us, someone fit to have a beer with, someone down-to-earth—in fact, almost anyone, provided that he or she doesn’t seem too intelligent or well educated.
