Monk

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this."

-- Albert Einstein

“I don’t believe in life after death. My beliefs really are Buddhist in style. I’ve been very attached to Buddhism. Buddhism makes it plain that you can have religion without God, that religion is in fact better off without God. It has to do with now, with every moment of one’s life, how one thinks, what one is and does, about love and compassion and the overcoming of self, the difference between illusion and reality.”

-- Iris Murdoch

Media_Group:
Why do you think so many people are afraid to admit they are atheists?

Bill Maher says:
Its where gay was 20 years ago, but its changing rapidly. Everyone thinks they're alone in it, and then they find themselves whispering with another person who feels the same way and they both go, "Then why are we whispering?"

-- ONTD

One hardly needs more evidence that America has more than a little bit of the Taliban in its own soul, but here is more anyway. Adore the God of love and peace, or we'll kill you! There was going to be a little atheist protest going into the political conventions, but no more.

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The American Atheist movement had planned a campaign to “question faith in politics”. But a frighteningly large volume of threats by email and phone has put an end to this exercise.

[...]

“No subject, no idea should be above scrutiny—and this includes religion in all forms,” Ms. Knief said. “We are saddened that by choosing to express our rights as atheists through questioning the religious beliefs of the men who want to be our president that our fellow citizens have responded with vitriol, threats, and hate speech against our staff, volunteers, and Adams Outdoor Advertising.”

-- News-LJ

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So much for life in the twenty-first century! Maybe the next century will be better. But I wouldn't bet on it.

People were taken aback by an electronic Bible coming to hotel rooms? Wait until they hear about one establishment’s innovation – swapping out Bibles for copies of the runaway E L James erotic bestseller “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

-- Molly Driscoll at The Christian Science Monitor

This is not in America, in case this needs to be pointed out. Great Britain. Which can still be a little surprising, because I think we are still talking about the same sort of Anglo stuffiness. On the other hand, I take it that England is more like Europe in that it is not very Christian.

One critical response: why bother with any book at all? People can easily bring their own, or maybe quickly buy one at the corner convenience store. However, I can see how a person may be traveling, or may be on a quick jaunt from home, and one could be caught short for diversion, and a hotel room can be a pretty stark place without a little pleasant diversion, if one is stuck at a very basic and affordable hotel anyway. And as much as I appreciate the Bible as a literary cornerstone, I cannot count it as very enjoyable reading. Although I have been in moods when I would read it with some spiritual hunger, I have to say, in general, it is more a bowl of vegetables than like a pizza, if you know what I mean.

In short, a little fiction sounds like a fine amenity. A little choice might be good, too. I'm not talking about a library, but a little selection: a Stephen King book, a detective novel, maybe something from higher literature. Porn is great, of course, but after you get off, which often takes only a few minutes, one could use a less heated bit of escapism, though a little more heated than the Bible, in which even the killings and rapes are rendered surprisingly dull.

Darwin's idea was particularly devastating to religions, because it offered a complete explanation for the origin of life. God is completely unnecessary for evolution to work -– that's what makes it such a powerful idea. Yet, over 150 years later, religions are still flourishing, a sign that it's going to take a lot more than a monumental discovery to quash religious sentiment.

-- George Dvorsky

That suggests an interesting question: what would it take to quash religious sentiment?

I suspect that nothing short of the realization of eternal life here on earth by natural means, and, moreover, this life probably has to be a fairly contented one, at least for most people. Anything short of that would probably feed into that extreme form of wish fulfillment that we call religion.

A curious argument for the propogation of the faith: for white people to have more children.

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There is a social policy argument to be made that sure, religion and the afterlife, its all dogmatic bullshit. But if you look at societies in which people largely abandoned these primitive and outmoded dogmas, one of the dogmas that they seem to also abandon at the same time is attachment to having children, to maintaining stable family structures in which children can most productively be raised. So, in fact as a society we do have an interest in the diffusion and continuation of religious dogma because otherwise we will wind up with a society of elderly childless atheist overlords who are being kept alive by stem-cell implants and supported by masses of God-fearing brown people who work for pennies on their plantations.

-- David Samuels at TabletMag.com

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I suspect the birth dearth has more to do with economics than with concern about the state of one's soul. Though, I suppose that faith may help one to be more optimistic, and hence to continue the family line. In any case, I do not think that you can regenerate faith in a culture. The greater fear, I should think, is that the impoverished brown people will take matters one step further and wipe out the lingering remnants of white people and their overlordship.

I saw the enticing news blurb that Richard Dawkins wants school children to read the Bible, and I had to check it out. The catch is that Dawkins believes that there are so many horrendous things in the Bible, that if more children actually read the thing, they would no longer be credulous about holding up the Bible as our prime moral law, not once they know what is actually in the book.

But I think Mr. Dawkins is missing a wrinkle. The moral proposition that the Bible holds up as supreme is that we ought to obey God. The Bible then shows us that this may entail committing genocide or even killing your own son, if God so commands it.

The key is this: who speaks for God? Unfortunately, this tends to be the right-wing zealots, the kind of people who may want to execute gays or deny women their reproductive liberty or impose their narrow religious views on everyone. When it comes to who gets to speak for God, the liberals voluntarily take themselves out of the equation.

Nevertheless, I agree that the Bible should be read, at least by anyone who wants to be accounted a substantively literate person. I am just saying that it would not end our problems with right-wing, evolution-denying, gay-hating, narrow minded Christianists.


(Source: Richard Dawkins at The Guardian)

Alain de Botton has been enjoying some good media buzz for months now. He courted controversy in arguing for a temple for atheist worship, and now he has written a book in which he advocates that secular people need to adopt some of the practices of religion, albeit without the supersition and supernaturalism, without God. As David Brooks explains in his book review:

De Botton is not calling for a religious revival. He finds it impossible to take faith in God seriously. He assumes that none of his educated readers could possibly believe in spooky ghosts in the sky.

Instead, he is calling on secular institutions to adopt religion’s pedagogy, to mimic the rituals, habits and teaching techniques that churches, mosques and synagogues perfected over centuries. For example, religious people were smart enough to combine spirituality and eating, aware that while dining in a group, people tend to be in a convivial, welcoming mood. De Botton believes that secular people should create communal restaurants that mimic the Passover Seder. Atheists would sit at big, communal tables. They would find guidebooks in front of them, reminiscent of the Jewish Haggadah or the Catholic missal. The rituals of the meal would direct diners to speak with one another, asking questions of their neighbors like “Whom can you not forgive?” or “What do you fear?”

Brooks is on the side of the believers, and he believes that this secular mimickry of religion is too tepid and hollow to give true spiritual food to the earnest seekers of divine transcendence. I do not know if there is a real divine transcendence to be had, but I am inclined to agree with Brooks. One definintely hungers for something beyond this world, if only because we can scarcely tolerate this earthbound existence, and there is this sense that only something outside of this known world can actually heal the pain and make us whole.

(Source: David Brooks, "Without Gods" in The New York Times)