This link has been bookmarked by 22 people . It was first bookmarked on 28 Oct 2007, by Paul Streby.
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But of course it is a necessary part of the argument that all possible human beliefs, including belief in evolution, must be explicable in precisely the same way; or else why single out religion for this treatment? Either we test ideas according to arguments in their favor, independent of their origins, thus making the argument from evolution irrelevant, or all possible beliefs come under the same suspicion of being only evolutionary adaptations—and thus biologically contingent rather than true or false. We find ourselves facing a version of the paradox of the Cretan liar: all beliefs, including this one, are the products of evolution, and all beliefs that are products of evolution cannot be known to be true.
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prevents mankind from facing up to “reality in all its naked cruelty.” But how can reality have any moral quality without having an immanent or transcendent purpose?)
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Everything? Including the need to question everything, and so on ad infinitum?
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st: “The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live.”
Let us leave aside the metaphysical problems that these three sentences raise. For Harris, the most important question about genocide would seem to be: “Who is genociding whom?” To adapt Dostoyevsky slightly, starting from universal reason, I arrive at universal madness.
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historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”
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It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.
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one can write the history of anything as a chronicle of crime and folly.
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First you decide what you hate, and then you gather evidence for its hatefulness.
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To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.
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It is true that he would say that everything is part of God’s providence, but, again, this is no more (and no less) a metaphysical belief than the belief in natural selection as an all-explanatory principle.
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Peter CruickshankOverall review of neo-atheistic books by the philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens
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To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.
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28 Oct 07
Paul StrebyThe thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy.
Page Comments
The search for the pure guiding light of
reason, uncontaminated by human passion or metaphysical principles that
go beyond all possible evidence, continues, however; and recently, an
epidemic rash of books has declared success, at least if success
consists of having slain the inveterate enemy of reason, namely
religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel
Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and
critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning
religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if
not of men, at least of authors.
The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear
to think that they are saying something new and brave. They imagine
themselves to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in
1853 disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then
wrote a book about his unprecedented feat. The public appears to agree,
for the neo-atheist books have sold by the hundred thousand. Yet with
the possible exception of Dennett’s, they advance no argument that I,
the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14 (Saint
Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence gave me the greatest
difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on the weakness of the
argument from design).
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