As the atheist writer and religion scholar Jacques Berlinerblau recently put it, “Can an atheist or agnostic commentator discuss any aspect of religion for more than 30 seconds without referring to religious people as imbeciles, extremists, mental deficients, fascists, enemies of the common good … conjure men (or) irrationalists?”
The behavior is unbecoming a school of thought that emphasizes rational complex thinking ”” and that has so much to offer if its practitioners can only live up to their own ideas about the value of an open mind.
The worst tendencies of atheists (who, by definition, believe God does not exist) and secularists (who are best described as “unreligious”) were framed for me during a recent e-mail exchange I had with a staff member of a humanist organization.
Discussing the relationship between science and religion, I had expressed my view that religion should leave scientific research to the scientists and devote itself, along with the fields of ethics and philosophy, to the mighty issues of the human condition: good and evil, the meaning of life, the nature of love and so forth. To which my correspondent replied: Why would something as inherently foolish as religion deserve a place at the table for discussions of that magnitude?
As someone who has studied religion and attended progressive churches, I was aghast. I had expected an articulate and intelligent advocate for the non-religious worldview to display a more nuanced understanding of that which she stood against.
“Fundamentalists” abound in all traditions – science, religion, politics, economics, and even in Journalism. It is amazing how blind we are to our own “fundamentalism.”
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
I have always wondered why athiests want to discuss religion so much. I do not believe in elves, for instance, and I do not feel compelled to talk about elves at all. They like to sell a negative.
#2: Elves, take notice!
The trouble is tha “the finest aspects of the human mind” are what we saw when Eve spoke to the serpent. Yes, yes, allegory, quite right, but man’s fundamental besetting sin is intellectual vanity; this is what the allegory is all about and it speaks the truth. Intellect is a good employee but the worst of employers. LM
Larry Morse – who says the story is the fall is allegory? I don’t think so. I have a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences – so you can consider me a scientist.
“story of the fall” – of course, having a Ph.D. means that I cannot proofread before hitting submit!
Why was Krattenmaker aghast at his humanist friend’s response? Atheism is an appeal to ignorance. It writes off an entire area of endeavor with platitudes. In some ways, depite its appeal to “intellectual endeavor”, atheism is one of the most anti-intellectual exercises of all. In the same way that TEC is “the thinking person’s church.”
“soccer hooligans of reasoned discourse”: I like it Hitchens and Dawkins exemplify the triumph of polemical rhetoric over reasoned discourse.
While at the ASA/Cis meeting in Edinburgh I heard Alister McGrath speak on some central issues in religion and science. He offered some reasoned criticisms of Dawkins’ argument, which are expounded at length in the book by his wife and himself, “The Dawkins Delusion.”
Neither theism nor atheism can be proven by scientific methods. Neither can the big bang be replicated. Science no longer recognizes its limitations.
Old saying: He was so open minded, his brains fell out!