The rise of militant atheism

[Fritz van Rikxoort]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Henk,

Pagina 5 van PS-bijlage Parool zaterdag 5e/9 jl.
zal je interesseren:
Nobelprijswinnaar Harry Kroto (Sir Harold Walter Kroto)
verhaalt er beeldend tegen religie als hinderpaal voor wetenschappelijk
denken en het uit de weg ruimen van de problemen die onafwendbaar op ons en
de wereldbol afkomen, zoals klimaatverandering en energieprobleem.

Hij wijst op het extreem "goede" onderwijs in religie, in fel contrast met
het vaak magere onderwijs in nuttige vakken. Hij geeft als voorbeeld een
jonge studente uit Iran, die niets van de belangrijkste punten uit zijn
college bleek te begrijpen, gevangene als de Graaf van Monte Cristoe, wat ze
zelf niet eens weet: "Oh nee", schrok ze, "ik ben moslim, ik kan u de hand
niet schudden". Zo'n bijna onoverwinnelijk stalen harnas, waar haast niet
doorheen valt te breken.

Een goede opvoeding draait om het koesteren van creativiteit, meer nog dan
om kennis, zegt hij, met tal van voorbeelden hoe religie dat bedreigt, al op
de eenvoudigste niveau's. Hij citeert Bertrand Russell, zie zei wat voor
wetenschap belangrijk is, is niet wát we geloven en wát we denken, maar hóe
we denken. Die cruciale boodschap had de studente uit Iran niet eens meer
kunnen begrijpen.

Bijvoorbeeld op nobelprize.org verhaalt Kroto zelf over religie e.d.
Beetje googelen en zijn heldere formuleringen liggen voor het oprapen.

Fritz van Rikxoort


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-d66 at NIC.SURFNET.NL [mailto:owner-d66 at NIC.SURFNET.NL] On Behalf
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Sent: Sunday, September 06, 2009 11:07 AM
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Subject: The rise of militant atheism

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http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20090906/focus/focus3.html

"
The rise of militant atheism

Published: Sunday | September 6, 2009
Ian Boyne, Contributor

Is religion good for society? Is the Bible really a good book let
alone 'The Good Book'? And does God really exist? Can we prove it? A
group of militant atheists have been giving a resounding and vehement
"No!" to all these questions, much to the consternation of Christians.

In the last few years, Christians have experienced their own Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse. There is no mystery to them, as they have
made no attempt to disguise their identities or agenda. They are named
Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens.
They have written some profoundly disturbing books in the last four
years: The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins); The End of Faith and Letter
to a Christian Nation (Sam Harris); Breaking the Spell: Religion as a
Natural Phenomenon (Daniel Dennett); and god is not Great (Christopher
Hitchens). Hitchens and Dawkins are the most dreaded of these four
"beasts" in Christian fundamentalist demonology.

Unknown to most Jamaican Christians, including many pastors and
theologians, there has been an intense, fierce and furious
intellectual battle taking place over God in North America and Britain
particularly, in the last four years. A new, militant atheism has
arisen. The New Atheists, as they have been dubbed, have been carrying
out their work with evangelistic and evangelical zeal. It's about
time, they say, as for too long thinking, rational people have allowed
Christians to dominate the public space, influencing public policy to
great societal damage, with their myths and dogmas.

Struggle

Christians, for example, have been at the forefront of the struggle
against the right of gay people to live without stigma and prejudice;
the right to have a "loving and legal marriage"; the "right" to adopt
and rear children. Christians have stoutly opposed women's sovereignty
over their own bodies, tyrannising public policy on abortion, as the
atheists would see it. Christians have opposed stem cell research
which would benefit people undergoing intense suffering. They are said
to be responsible for untold suffering in places like Africa where
AIDS has been rampant, because of the teaching of Christianity's
largest denomination (Catholicism) against the use of condoms.
Catholic teaching forbidding policy on artificial birth control has
both swelled and harmed populations in Latin America where Catholicism
has been strong.

Christians, charge the New Atheists, have been responsible for
supporting or giving justification to some of the most obnoxious
social evils which mankind has known. Christopher Hitchens sees
religion as child abuse and devotes a whole chapter in his book, "god
is not Great, defending that thesis.

"Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and
bigotry; invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry;
contemptuous of women and coercive toward children, organised religion
ought to have a great deal on its conscience," Hitchens spews in his
highly polemical and angry book. (He sees it as justified outrage; the
sort rational persons should exhibit to the kind of atrocities
religion fosters, in his view).

Atrocious behaviour

And it is not only that Christians, as fallible human beings, have not
been able to live out the ideal of the Bible and, therefore, they
engage in atrocious behaviour. No, say people like Dawkins and
Hitchens. That is how the Christians' God behaves. Explains Dawkins in
his book, The God Delusion: "The God of the Old Testament is arguably
the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it;
petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, blood-thirsty
ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticide,
genocidal, filicidal pestilential, megalomanical, sadomasochistic,
capriciously bully."

Some Christians might even condemn me for quoting this "blasphemous"
passage from the Gospel of Dawkins; a passage which would, under
previous era, land him in jail. But people would be shocked to know
that long before Hitchens wrote that, the revered American Founding
Father Thomas Jefferson said, "The Christian God is a being of
terrific character - cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust". But
now the New Atheists are popularising their ideas through the big
American media, of which they have become darlings. Dawkins, Harris
and Hitchens' books have been best-sellers on the New York Times lists
(Dennett is more sober and restrained, hence less of a pull for
media.)

The New Atheists have been helped considerably by a growing group of
Christians, including scholars and pastors, who have become atheists
and who are now openly confessing their atheism. From the 19th century
particularly, with the rise of Biblical criticism, a huge percentage
of Biblical scholars have rejected conservative views that the Bible
is the inerrant word of God. Many Biblical scholars see the Bible as a
human book, limited by culture and history and not by any means immune
from error.

One prominent Biblical scholar who has become an atheist and who is a
celebrity in the big American media is Professor Bart Ehrman who over
the last few years has produced a stream of books devastating to
Christianity and the Bible: Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind who
Changed the Bible and Why; The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture; Lost
Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths we Never
Knew; Lost Scriptures: Books That Did not Make It Into the New
Testament; God's problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer our Most
Important Question - Why we Suffer and his most recent; Jesus
Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why
We Don't know About Them).

Ehrman was a Bible-believer, Gospel-toting Fundamentalist Christian
schooled in the most conservative Evangelical seminaries in America -
Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton. But he later went to Princeton
where he gained a PhD in New Testament studies. In his book God's
problem he tells how he lost his faith after becoming a pastor and
preaching every Sunday and holding prayer group and Bible studies.

"I realised that I could no longer reconcile the claims of faith with
the facts of life. I could no longer explain how there can be a good
and all-powerful God actively involved with this world given the state
of things. For many people inhabiting this planet, life is a cesspool
of misery and suffering. I came to the point where I could not believe
that there is a good and kindly disposed Ruler who is in charge of
it."

I could no longer believe

Unlike what almost every Christian might believe, Ehrman did not leave
willingly, but tried to hang on to his faith until he simply could not
anymore, his faith bursting under the weight of contrary evidence, as
he would see it. "I did not go easily. On the contrary, I left kicking
and screaming, wanting desperately to hold on to the faith I had known
from my childhood. But I came to the point where I could no longer
believe".

In the view of the New Atheists like Harris, Dennett, Dawkins and
Hitchens, only the tiniest minority have the courage to leave an
unthinking faith, which is what all religious faith is ultimately.
Besides, the vast majority are simply not bright enough to realise
they what they believe is an illusion, a myth, a fable like those from
Greek legends. In fact, Dawkins has angered Christians for years by
saying he cannot see how any educated person can believe in God. He
says the evidence for evolution is too overwhelming and coercive for
any person who claims to be educated to deny that evidence and say he
does not believe in evolution.

He says atheists should be simply called Brights for those who are not
atheists are not bright. (Dawkins , from the prestigious Oxford
University, is considered the most arrogant of all the new atheists,
followed closely by Hitchens). Hitchens says in his book, god is not
Great: "Religion comes from a period of human pre-history where nobody
had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from bawling and a
fearful infancy of our species and is a babyish attempt to meet our
inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance
and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children
knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of
religion."

The growth of Islamic fanaticism and terrorism; the danger of militant
Islam to democracy and peace and the 9/11 experience have served to
reinforce the view that religion is bad for society. In addition, the
New Atheists are buttressed by scientific evidence which seems to
prove that religion is harmful to sociological and psychological
health.

The facts

An international survey of 23,000 persons in 17 democracies shows that
"in general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator
correlate with high rates of homicide, juvenile and early mortality
STD-infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous
democracies". (See Gregory Paul's article in Vol. 7, 2005 issue of The
Journal of Religion and Health).

Secular Europe scores higher on a number of indices of social health
than the more religious United States. Japan, which is a highly
secularised society, is far more peaceful and sociologically healthy
than religious America.

Says Gregory in his Journal of Religion and Society essay: "The United
States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the democracies,
sometimes spectacularly so. No democracy is known to have combined
strong religiosity and popular denial of evolution with high rates of
societal health. The US is the least efficient Western nation in terms
of converting wealth into cultural and physical health". And a
religion is a major factor say the militant atheists.
"

... we zijn weer geïnformeerd .. ;)

Henk Elegeert

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