The End of Faith

[_truth dancer]

The End of Faith, religion, terror, and the future of reason. Has anyone read it? What do ya'll think?

I find it a powerful, thought provoking, bold and honest look at our current world situation regarding relgion and our beliefs.

I LOVED it.

I can't say I agree with it all... I'm still sorting out ideas concerning Islam but the book is insightful and important.

I would love to hear your thoughts...

Thanks,

~dancer~

I wrote a brief review on my blog if anyone is interested: http://goodnessgraciousness.blogspot.com

[_truth dancer]

Have ya'll not read this book or are you just not wanting to comment? It is such a powerful book, so timely! I would think this book would be pretty significant for believers of all sorts! Where are our resident experts on Islam? On Dawkins?

:-)

~dancer~

Can you tell I REALLY liked this book!? LOL!

[_rcrocket]

I read it and enjoyed it, but it was more of a slam on Islam than anything else. He tackles Christianity but his venom is reserved for Islam. If he wanted to slam Christianity, he could have been lots more knowledgeable of the Crusades, Languedoc, the Inquisition, and the like, but he wasn't.

And I think he treats Islam unfairly. With the exception of the original Islamic conquest, by and large Islam has existed peacefully and in coexistence with Christianity and Judaism except where Christian nations have attempted to use their hegemony to afflict Islam.

How would you like it if the British government one day told you that your homeland, which your ancestors have held for 1000 years, is no longer yours, and get out or we'll kill you.

He doesn't handle state-sponsored oppression very well.

For what it is worth.

[_Runtu]

Have ya'll not read this book or are you just not wanting to comment? It is such a powerful book, so timely! I would think this book would be pretty significant for believers of all sorts! Where are our resident experts on Islam? On Dawkins?

:-)

~dancer~

Can you tell I REALLY liked this book!? LOL!

It's on my list, but I haven't read it yet.

[_Ray A]

I wrote a brief review on my blog if anyone is interested: http://goodnessgraciousness.blogspot.com

TD, I had a look at your blog review, but I haven't read Harris, though heard a lot about his book. Haven't bought The God Delusion either, though I was a bit premature and it was not yet in bookshops when I looked. But here is an ABC (Australia) interview about Dawkins: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/backgroundbrie ... transcript

Excerpt:

Kirsten Garrett: Richard Dawkins starts by reading from the beginning of the book.

Richard Dawkins: The boy lay prone in the grass, his chin resting on his hands. He suddenly found himself overwhelmed by a heightened awareness of the tangled stems and roots of forest in microcosm, a transfigured world of ants and beetles, and even (though he wouldn't remember details at the time) of soil bacteria, by the billions, silently and invisibly shoring up the economy of the micro world.

Suddenly the micro forest of the turf seemed to swell and become one with the universe, and with the rapt mind of the boy contemplating it. He interpreted the experience in religious terms, and it led him eventually to the priesthood. He was ordained an Anglican priest, and became a chaplain at my school, a teacher of whom I was fond.

In another time and place, that boy could have been me, under the stars, dazzled by Orion, Caseopea and Ursa Major, tearful with the unheard music of the Milky Way, heady with the night scents of frangipani and trumpet-flowers in an African garden.

Why the same emotion should have led my chaplain in one direction and me in the other, is not an easy question to answer. A quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists. It has no connection with supernatural belief.

I often hear myself described as a deeply religious man. An American student wrote to me that she'd asked her professor whether he had a view about me. 'Sure', he replied, 'his positive science is incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about nature and the universe. To me that is religion.'

But is 'religion' the right word? I don't think so. Much unfortunate confusion is caused by failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion. Einstein sometimes invoked the name of God, and he's not the only atheistic scientist to do so, inviting misunderstanding by supernaturalists eager to misunderstand, and claim so illustrious a thinker as their own.

The dramatic (or was it mischievous) ending of Stephen Hawkins's 'A Brief History of Time', ('for then we should know the mind of God') is notoriously misconstrued. It has led people to believe, mistakenly of course, that Hawking is a religious man. One of Einstein's most eagerly-quoted remarks is 'Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.' But Einstein also said 'It was of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions; a lie which has been systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God, and I have never denied this, but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious, then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.'

Does it seem that Einstein contradicted himself, that his words can be cherry-picked for quotes to support both sides of an argument? No. By religion Einstein meant something entirely different from what is conventionally meant. As I continue to clarify the distinction between supernatural religion on the one hand and Einsteinian religion on the other, bear in mind that I'm calling only supernatural gods delusional.

I'm now going to skip to an extract from Chapter 2: The God Hypothesis.

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Jealous, and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak, a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, philicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways, can become desensitised to their horror. A naïf, blessed with the perspective of innocence, has a clearer perception. Winston Churchill's son, Randolph, somehow contrived to remain ignorant of Scripture until Evelyn Waugh and a brother officer, in a vain attempt to keep Churchill quiet when they were posted together during the war, bet him he couldn't read the entire Bible in a fortnight. Unhappily, it has not had the result we hoped. He has never read any of it before, and is hideously excited, keeps reading quotations aloud, 'I say, I bet you didn't know this came in the Bible!' or merely slapping his side and chortling, 'God, isn't God a crap?'

Thomas Jefferson, better read, was of a similar opinion. 'The Christian God is a being of terrific character; cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.'

It is unfair to attack such an easy target. The God Hypothesis should not stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation, Yahweh, nor his insipidly opposite Christian face, gentle Jesus, meek and mild. To be fair, this milksop persona owes more to his Victorian followers than to Jesus himself. Could anything be more mawkishly nauseating than Mrs C.F. Alexander's 'Christian children all must be mild, obedient, good as he.'

I'm not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh or Jesus or Allah, or any other specific god, such as Baal, Zeus of Wotan, instead I shall define the God Hypothesis more defensively. There exists a super-human, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view. Any creative intelligence of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligences being evolved necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God is a delusion, and as later chapters will show, a pernicious delusion.

Christianity claims to be a monotheistic religion, but you have to wonder sometimes. Rivers of mediaeval ink, not to mention blood, have been squandered over the mystery of the Trinity, and in suppressing deviations, such as the Aryan heresy. Ayrus of Alexandria in the 4th century AD, denied that Jesus was con-substantial, i.e. of the same substance of essence, with God. What on earth could that possibly mean? you're probably asking. Substance, what substance? What exactly do you mean by essence? Very little, seems the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century and the Emperor Constantine ordered that all copies of Ayrus' book should be burned. Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs, such has ever been the way of theology.

Do we have one God in three parts, or three gods in one? The Catholic Encyclopaedia clears up the matter for us in a masterpiece of theological close reasoning. 'In the unity of the godhead there are three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; these three persons being truly distinct, one from another. Thus in the words of the Athanasian Creed, the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three gods but one god.

As if that were not clear enough, the Eyclopaedia quotes the 3rd century theologian, St Gregory, the Miracle Worker. 'There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the Trinity, nor is there anything that has been added as though it once had not existed, but had entered afterwards. Therefore the Father has never been without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit, and this same Trinity is immutable and unalterable forever.'

Whatever miracles may have earned St Gregory his nickname, they were not miracles of honest lucidity. His words convey the characteristically obscurantist flavour of theology, which unlike science, or most other branches of human scholarship, has not moved on in 18 centuries. Thomas Jefferson, as so often, got it right when he said, 'Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct, before reason can act upon them, and no man ever had a distinct idea of the Trinity. It is the mere abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.'

Jefferson heaped ridicule on the doctrine that, as he put it, 'there are three Gods' in his critique of Calvinism. But it is especially the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity that pushes its recurrent flirtation with polytheism towards runaway inflation. The Trinity, is joined by Mary, Queen of Heaven, a goddess in all but name, who surely runs God himself a close second as a target of prayers. The pantheon is further swollen by an army of saints, whose intercessory power makes them, if not demigods, well worth approaching on their own specialist subjects. The Catholic community forum hopefully lists 5,120 saints, together with their areas of expertise, which include abdominal pain, abuse victims, anorexia, arms dealers, blacksmiths, broken bones, bomb technicians and bowel disorders, to venture no further than the Bs.

Pope John Paul II created more saints than all his predecessors of the past several centuries put together. And he had a special affinity with the Virgin Mary. His polytheistic hankerings were dramatically demonstrated in 1981 when he suffered an assassination attempt in Rome, and attributed his survival to intervention by Our Lady of Fatima, a maternal hand guided the bullet. One cannot help wondering why she didn't guide it to miss him altogether. Others might think the team of surgeons who operated on him for six hours deserved at least a share of the credit. But perhaps their hands too were maternally guided. The relevant point is that it wasn't just Our Lady, who in the Pope's opinion guided the bullet, but specifically Our Lady of Fatima. Presumably Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Guadeloupe, Our Lady of Medjugorje, Our Lady of Akita, Our Lady of Zeitoun, Our Lady of Garabandal, and Our Lady of Knock, were busy on other errands at the time.

[_Coggins7]

I read it and enjoyed it, but it was more of a slam on Islam than anything else. He tackles Christianity but his venom is reserved for Islam. If he wanted to slam Christianity, he could have been lots more knowledgeable of the Crusades, Languedoc, the Inquisition, and the like, but he wasn't.

And I think he treats Islam unfairly. With the exception of the original Islamic conquest, by and large Islam has existed peacefully and in coexistence with Christianity and Judaism except where Christian nations have attempted to use their hegemony to afflict Islam.

How would you like it if the British government one day told you that your homeland, which your ancestors have held for 1000 years, is no longer yours, and get out or we'll kill you.

He doesn't handle state-sponsored oppression very well.

For what it is worth.

Loran:

You're understanding of Islam, Plutarch, is abjectly inadaquate. You're statement that "With the exception of the original Islamic conquest, by and large Islam has existed peacefully and in coexistence with Christianity and Judaism except where Christian nations have attempted to use their hegemony to afflict Islam" is ahistorical to such an extent that any attempt to correct it here would take such massive quantities of bandwidth (and time) that I'd rather prefer that you make some attempt to do your own homework (and a great deal of that seems necessary based upon the contents of your post).

You've attparanty fogotton that the Crusades were purly defensive reactions to Muslim conquests and atrotices in lands that were at that time predominantly Christian in orientation and culture, and wer not proactive in nature. You've also apparantly forgot the entire history of the 20th Century, the Muslim world's close associaltion with Nazism, and then the Soviets, and the history of Muslim thought, attitudes, and behavior since the creation of Israel in 1947.

The Muslim world is a failed civilization, and Islam itself, as to a number of its core concepts (and the fact that Islam cannot be, at least at present, conceived to exist in any full or legitimate since outside of a theocratic system in which church and state are idendified), is a fundamental part of that failure and the predatory nature or Islamic civiliztion from its inception and days of high culture to its implosion over the last several centuries, with the internal rot coming to a head in the 20th.

Other aspects of your post reflect the most egregious trendy leftwing mythology (re the "plight" of the "palestinian people") and at this point isn't woth responding to.

Loran

[_truth dancer]

Thanks for the comments... I totally enjoyed this book but can't say that I agree with everything, especially the discussion on Islam. I'm still in the "figuring out" stage and so am reading information and opinions on all sides of the fence. :-) (Last week I read Karen Armstrong)!

I do think the discussion concerning religion, rational thinking, and the world is a very important one...

In terms of Islam... here is my concern.

While much of what is written in the Quran suggest violence is acceptable, is it not true that many followers ignore that part of their scripture? Similarly to how most Christians ignore much of the Old Testament, and many Mormons ignore much of the early teachings? Because it is written in scripture does not necessarily mean followers embrace its teaching regardless of which religion. Seems pretty much everyone (except extremists and radicals) pick and choose what they will follow.

Loren, did you read the book? What do you think about its premise? Plutarch, aside from the Islam issue, what did you think about the conflict between faith and rational thinking?

:-)

~dancer~