Letters to the Editor
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close your eyes
If you want "proof" of the resurrection, parting of the Red Sea, and so on, calm down your thoughts, close your eyes, get yourself into a state between waking and sleeping, and see it already. It's overwhelmingly beautiful and there for the asking. If you do in fact see it, you will never need a scientist to "prove" it to you. There is no reason why people cannot just get it together and use your mind to it's fullest potential. I am not a religious fanatic, never went to church and never will, and really don't respect any institution of belief. But I believe I'll be content forever with the memories of what I saw.
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John Haught
John Haught is truly, deeply, maddeningly ignorant of science, evolution and atheism.
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God is fun!
Wow! Why are there so many angry atheists?
I was raised an atheist but eventually got bored of it. If we are free to define "God" however the hell we want to, why not come up with a definition that you can believe in?
As far as I can tell there are basically two different atheist positions:
A)"there is no such thing as God"
B)"I am indifferent to this whole god concept, and feel it is a waste of time thinking about something that we could never prove"
The former position requires that one have a definition of "God" while the latter position requires that one does not.
While it is very easy, and often emotionally satisfying, to contemplate what things I do not believe, I find it much more rewarding (and much more challenging) trying to figure out exactly what I do believe. For this reason I prefer to believe in God (defined any way I want) rather than not.
The fun (and imaginative) part is coming up with that definition, and it is a lifelong creative process.
I guess I could do the same thing without reference to the word 'God', but then I'd just cutting myself off from all that thinking that has gone into all the different religious traditions around the world regarding one's relationship to the universe and finding meaning within it.
I am not going to give you my working definition at the moment, but I will say that it is constantly evolving, and (take note Styrofoam Blocks) it does help me sleep at night.
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Science is the only true path to peace
Gosh, what a bunch of crap.
The first thing any scientist will tell you is how much more we don't know than what we do. Nor does any reputable person of science that I know of even begin to entertain the notion that somehow science will one day be able to account for everything.
There are all kinds of 'subjective' aspects of our daily experience we simply have to live with, knowing that the intertangled subtleties will not likely be empirically unraveled in our lifetimes, if ever. I have great sympathy for people who look at this immense mess and say, 'well, I have to believe there's a man behind the curtain'. This doesn't make such a view any more credible, however, and to argue that it is more noble than the alternative is nothing but hate-mongering.
There are countless really great reasons for acting with compassion and exploring other states of consciousness without invoking a giant imaginary friend. Look, the science-without-religion crowd isn't this army of termites trying to tear down your beautiful antique credenza (although, admittedly, some of the more spiteful athiests with chips on their shoulders might convince you otherwise)-- it's more like a few dorky kids trying to tease out the processes involved with the growth of the wood and the methods employed to shape it into a finished product... and if one of them gets a splinter, the others will feel bad for them and try to help get it out. This last bit is an aspect of human behavior we don't have ALL the explanations for, but we understand a lot of it-- and we don't need a magical, invisible pink unicorn to do so.
Seriously, until everyone on this planet realizes that the ONLY path to true peace and progress on this planet is by shaping our governmental policies ONLY by what we can all agree upon - which can ONLY be science, pretty much by definition - we're screwed. As long as people think it's okay to believe some made-up stuff which sounds nice that their grandparents shoved down their throats along with holiday dinner, and there are other people who believe different & conflicting things for the same reason, those two groups will keep clashing, often bloodily. Unfortunately, it's not just two groups, either-- it's thousands. This needs to stop, and the only way is for us all to get on the same page mentally, and there's only one way to do that. You will convince a lot of fundamentalists to respect a universally-acceptable approach to understanding & interacting with the world looong before you will convert them to a competing set of fables. It's time to grow up and realize that some ideas just aren't worth our time.
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I will not be renewing my account.
Perhaps the financial incentive will make you reconsider printing dishonest and insulting garbage.
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I blame the Jews
There, now we can all go home.
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Theology is not a real subject
This is just babble. It might have helped if Salon had used an interviewer who actually understood Darwin (evolution is not random), or who was prepared to ask difficult questions, such as: given that there are fundamental mysteries in nature (something scientists cannot deny, since it would leave them nothing to do) how do you get from what is a perfect vacuum in our knowledge to 'knowledge' of a highly specific god, one whose thoughts theologians even claim to know? Or: how do you reconcile the impoverished myths of an ignorant desert tribe with a universe some 13 billion years old? (What was god doing all that time? Why does the Bible treat this world as if it were the centre of the universe?) If the Bible should not be taken literally, how do believers decide which parts are optional and which obligatory?
There is nothing at all to connect the transcendent mystery of creation with, say, an invisible lunatic who arranged to have his own son tortured to death so that he could give up his plan to burn us all in hell. Under what authority does Haught claim to know that a camera could not have recorded the resurrection? There can be none: he is just making it up. It is no wonder atheists are getting angry, when apologists for religion can invent arguments at random and expect to be taken seriously, even chastising atheists for being ignorant of their inventions.
And they accuse atheists of being closed-minded. Well, I am not tormented by thoughts that Wotan, for example, might be real, I've never felt I ought to sacrifice a child to Baal, and I'm quite certain Haught and Huckabee are not keeping an open mind on these questions either.
I don't find anything hopeful in the idea of a personal god: I find the idea utterly horrifying. The meaning of my life comes from how I live it and from the - real - world around me; it does not have to be borrowed from god at infinite interest.