Letters to the Editor
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Travelall
All theology is, is the long, ancient art of making excuses for what doesn't exist.
It has provided us with no cures, no technologies, no new knowledge even within its own field.
Whenever the Bible has gone up against scientific thought (Whether it be through the shape of the Earth or the origins of species) it has taken a pummelling. It hasn't even proved that accurate a telling of history, as the blood libel against the Jews shows.
At its height, at around 1000AD a great plague swept the Western World and is estimated to have halved the human population.
In the 200 years in which atheism has been legal and science has reigned supreme in human thought, human life expectancy has gone from 20 to 30 to 67. Indeed much of that gain has been in the 20th century.
To call science, which has definite, measurable results a theology, a form of religion, is to ignore the vast differences in results between the two.
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"Atheist Delusion"
I've been an atheist my entire life and if that means I'm deluded, then so be it. I don't, however, think that it does mean that. I think it means, quite simply, that I realized early on there is no god--and so what? This lack of belief in an obviously mythical entity hasn't corrupted me, made me immoral or evil, caused me to harm anyone. I haven't even lost my sense of humor. I don't hold anything against religious believers--at least those few who have no inclination to persecute or otherwise harm those who disagree with them. If you feel that you "need a worldview that is capable of justifying the confidence that we place in our minds, in truth, in goodness, in beauty," then by all means cook one up. Whatever works.
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So many straw men, so little time.
Haught doesn't offer any reasonable criticism of atheism, and no reasonable defense of religion, precisely because there aren't any. He does offer a lot of false reasoning, invalid assumptions, bad presumptions, all the while pretending to some Higher Truth.
That's dishonest. Evidently it is Haught who is delusional, and not atheists.
The problem is that simple facts and simple reasoning, much less science, clearly show that many of the claims of religion are absolutely false. It's not the fault of science that religion is wrong, but science gets attacked anyway. Not the other way around. Religion is dishonest about that, but then, religion depends on dishonesty.
Religion cannot dismiss factual reasoning and at the same time claim to be reasonable. That's a contradiction. But that's what religion insists on doing. And that's dishonest also.
Moreover, the more facts and reasoning you show religionists the more angry they get, and if you show them enough they lose their tempers:
Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God.
- Martin Luther
It is also dishonest for religion to claim that it's not possible to 'prove or disprove' the existence of gods, because proof is for strictly for mathematics and cannot be applied to the empirical world, for which one must resort to evidence and logic. It's a red herring, because the concept simply does not apply.
It doesn't help for religionists to claim that gods belong to the spiritual world, and not the physical world, because that would be an admission that gods do not exist in the physical world but only in the imaginations of religionists, and therefore that gods do not exist. This they have to avoid, like all facts and reasoning. That's dishonest too.
But religionists do require it to apply, and again, religion is dishonest. There are no valid facts and no valid logic which demonstrate that gods exist, exactly as there are no valid facts and no valid logic which demonstrate that unicorns exist. Therefore, unicorns do not exist. Neither does the Easter bunny, the Tooth Fairy, or Santa Claus. And neither do gods.
But religionists nevertheless insist that gods do exist, and are prepared to lie and kill if you don't believe in gods in the same way that they do. Any characteristic contrary to the beliefs of religionists makes the possessor subject to their attack. I submit to you that religion is contrary to morals by its very nature.
It's remarkable how much the invisible resembles the non-existent. Show me the unicorns. Then we'll talk.
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to a hammer
every problem looks like a nail.
i feel sorry for people like haught--people who have PhD's in angelology and its spinoffs. what a waste of a good mind that this guy wrote a thesis on nonsense, and then gets to sit in his academic office making up more nonsense. and he gets paid! the power of magical thinking is extraordinary.
one thing has changed though--once upon a time a great mind, an aquinas or maimonides, say, was a massively terrible waste. here were two brilliant men who, rather than figure out better sewer systems or advance medicine and so on, chose to waste their lives on a bunch of ridiculous crap. haught, on the other hand, is just another idiot academic. we've got better minds than him working on things that matter.
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Enough!
You know, we atheists and agnostics try to be nice and let you folks go along with your little God myths, because really, on an individual level, what harm is there? I mean, that’s what the whole “overlapping magisteria” thing is about, so we can pat you on the head and say, “Good boy, now go out in the yard and play.” It’s kind of cute, really.
But then we get George W. Bush and Mike Huckabee and Osama bin Laden out of the deal. Intelligent design and Eretz Israel and the belief that East Timor (conquered for Islam in 1975!) is now and forever part of the caliphate.
So now we have this fricking theological coward lecturing us about how science is really just a faith-based belief system etc., etc., etc.
Well, go back to your hut, God-boy. Stop using electricity. Make fire by hand. Shave with a rock.
This guy is supposed to be a Roman Catholic. Golly Gosh, I had some of that myself in my youth, and I can tell you that for a good Catholic a) God is damn well personal – he’s got more 411 on you than Santa Claus, and b) Mary was a Virgin and Jesus died on the cross. This pisher doesn’t even have the courage of his own religious convictions.
To wit:
“In the final analysis, we hope and trust that God will show or reveal himself as one who has been accompanying our prayers and responding to the world all along, but not necessarily in the narrow way that the human mind is able to conjure up.”
That narrow way being a belief in a personal God?
Q: What do you make of the miracles in the Bible -- most importantly, the Resurrection? Do you think that happened in the literal sense?
A: “I don't think theology is being responsible if it ever takes anything with completely literal understanding."
What a damned coward.