Letters to the Editor
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Religion Topics on Salon Kick Butt!
Have you noticed how fast the posts pile up whenever Salon puts up a religion-oriented topic?
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Einstein
Einstein did not believe in a "personal God". He did not believe that God was involved in daily life or performed miracles. I like that because it always makes me cringe when you hear people praying to win a football game or claiming that someone was saved by God. I mean, what about all the other people that didn't make it through a tragedy? Did God want them dead or something? Maybe he didn't like them.
On the other hand, Einstein did believe in a "God who reveals Himself in the harmony of all that exists." There is somethere there folks. I have personally thought that this was evident in the way that planets revolve around the sun and the way electrons revolve around the nucleus. Is this pattern just there by accident?
Is evolution really beyond the power of a Creator? Maybe it's the Bible that is untrue and evolved to control humanity and it has nothing to do with God.
Einstein is not a prophet, but I think we can all agree that he was the most brilliant scientist of the 20th century. Here is what he had to say about the arrogance of atheism which is evident in these responses:
"I'm not an atheist. I don't think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws."
If Al couldn't figure it out, I don't think anyone here has either.
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What utter crap
Reminds me why I am not giving Salon Premium memberships for Xmas this year
Ok, enough already. Who on the editorial board at Salon is backing this continuous stream of theist apologetics? C'mon Salon, your audience is smarter than that -- and you should be too.
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Childhood pragmatism
When I was about 8 years old I had a difficult time reconciling what I was being taught in catachism on Sundays with the science I was being taught in school. So I decided that Adam and Eve were apes. It's not a belief system I would advocate 30+ years later, but it worked for my 8 year old self.
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The top stone in a pyramid?
It's like the top stone of a pyramid that conditions everything else in the pyramid. In our own lives, we all have something like a top stone. If it were suddenly removed, it would cause our lives to fall apart.
In addition to misunderstanding atheism and being hypocritical about his supposed belief in god, Mr. Haught also doesn't understand architecture. If you remove the top stone in a pyramid, nothing happens at all. He's thinking of the keystone in an arch.
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Haught isn't an enemy
As an unbeliever I'm still rather taken aback at all the vitriol directed at Haught. He has a point saying that science can't give us purpose. Of course, we unbelievers as individuals can develop a sense of purpose without formal religion, and without God. But on a societal level--on a social evolution level--it probably is functional that some structure of purpose-giving belief (God-centered or not) be transmitted to succeeding generations. It is simplistic for nonbelievers only to reject God and religion--we must think about what to replace them with. It is no accident that all coherent societies have had some kind of unifying belief system. The challenge is to develop one that does not conflict with the truths science gives us. Haught, to his credit, is trying to advocate for something like that using God-language. Nonbelievers should focus on doing the same, without the religious baggage.
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?
What is God?
Whom are the Gods?
To save mankind from What?
Heaven, Paradise and Illusions!
Thank You
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Felt like I dunked my head in pea soup and tried to listen to the world.
Haught is a doddering co-dependent, fingering his worry beads.
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@One Comment
I won't defend all the comments here, but I think people were offended not by the notion that "science can't give us purpose" as much as what they took to be the notion that "only religion can give us purpose". I think in the U.S. these days, with all the fundamentalist dogma that's thrown at us, these sorts of statements get peoples' hackles up (I don't blame them for that, really, it bothers me, as well, as an agnostic).
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Spiritual atheism: new directions
Atheists are beginning to develop new models of spirituality. See, for example, D. Midbar's essay at
http://www.atheistprayer.blogspot.com/
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On this "Persecuted Atheists" Topic
The idiotic fundamentalist Christians try to portray themselves as persecuted by American society, even when they obviously are not persecuted, even while they have part of the upper hand in America now.
This has to do with their nostalgia for the Good Old Days, back when Nero and Caligula fed hem to lions. These people yearn for that Golden Age when Christians were Christians and lions were lions, as opposed to now, when it's so darn hard to tell the Good Guys from the Evil Guys.
However, I recommend that you Atheists do not try to take up this theme. I have read several Salon posts with this "Discriminated-Against Atheists" theme, recently. At first, I believed they were hilarious parodies of the idiotics christianists. But now, I worry. This is not a tenable line of argument.
Do not join your evil enemies. Nobody discriminates against you except the whakos fundamentalists themselves. They prove their cuckooness with this theme. All you need to do is just speak rationally, or keep quiet.
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sigh
If atheism were reasonable or intelligent or whatnot, then why are all the atheists here so unnecessarily angry, full of bile and insults, so much knee-jerk reaction to someone who, if they were correct, wouldn't be much of a challenge to their belief system? If this guy is wrong, then he's wrong. But as I can see it he is hurting nothing and no one by writing what he writes. So why the fuss from the angry atheists?
Undoubtedly there are a lot of reasonable atheists who find this article not in the least offensive or challenging, and they are wisely refraining from making themselves look stupid by posting angry rebukes.
As to all the angry atheists here, I can only comment that your responses strike me as sounding an awful lot like fundamentalists who defend their false constructions of faith simply because they wouldn't know what else to do with themselves.
So, some guy who is educated in Sartre, Darwin and theology has called your atheist belief system less than perfect. Welcome to the world of critical thought! People criticize my belief system on a regular basis. But my beliefs are big enough to withstand their criticism, so I don't take much notice. Perhaps you angry atheists would do well to recognize that your system of belief would get a lot more credit if you weren't all so... dogmatic about it.