Letters to the Editor
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Speaking of philosophical knuckleheads . . .
Then suddenly in the mid-nineteenth century we get a crop of philosophical knuckleheads who arbitrarily decide the human race cannot progress even one more step without jettisoning belief.
Didn't you hear there's an energy shortage? You should waste less hot air blowdrying strawmen.
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ronnyduarte
...he took broad swipes at Mother Teresa without ever talking to her or spending some time in one of the more than 700 homes that she had established around the world
As someone who couldn't disagree more with Hitchens regarding recent events and thinks his latest effort is misguided, he was spot on about Mother Teresa. You don't have to meet someone to read documented accounts of their works. The fact is that Mother Teresa used billions of dollars to set up convents to spread the word of fundamentalist dogma, not to heal the sick (she lobbied all over the world to outlaw not just abortion, but contraception). And when she was told that millions of dollars she'd received from savings and loan thief Charles Keating had been stolen, she refused to return it. She explicitly believed that suffering brought us closer to Christ and so deliberately avoided alleviating it, while she chose to receive only the best medical care when she needed it.
But don't my word for it.
http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/shields_18_1.html
http://members.lycos.co.uk/bajuu/
Again, I'm not an atheist and I know that there are many, many wonderful, selfless people out there who are inspired and guided by their faith. Mother Teresa was most certainly not one of them.
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zeke
I'll make a thorough study of "modern theological, scholarly discourse" just as soon as any theologian advances any kind of evidence for the premises for his/her faith.
But how will any theologian convince you of anything if you refuse to read theology? There's a widely held and mistaken assumption that all theologians start from the point 'God exists so..." when it is the case that many start from the point 'Experiential truth has taught me X, Y and Z so..." Evidence and reason are only constituent parts of experiential truth; science can tell us many helpful things about clinical depression but it has nothing to say about the feeling of it, the unshakeable humour that infects everything a depressed person does. Neither has cold rationality and that's because neither empiricism nor rationality lie at the heart of human experience; they are only invaluable parts of it. In this respect, blaming religion for not being accessible purely through reason is akin to blaming a pain in your foot for not being provable by a theorem.
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4-Steve from Iowa
Steve,
I didn't find your post judgmental in the least. What I recognize was something subtle, and that simply led me to want to expand on something related. One part of that was my interest in the irony of the ineffable, as it is applied in most religions. How does one claim to serve the ineffable, while adhering to such detailed, dogmatic descriptions of that very ineffability? One cannot finely define what/who God is, and then say...oh, but God is mysterious and we can't understand "him". It doesn't jibe with all the prescriptive doctrine which is very specific -requiring specific behaviors, and even thoughts- and its use as rule of law throughout history. If it's ineffable, then there can be no certainty of how one should come to it, express it, and least of all be governed by it. This seems obvious to me, but clearly it isn't to a very many.
As for the way you express your faith, I honor it, have no judgment about it, I just don't choose it. I am glad to know it works for you.
I am only comfortable saying that I don't have a need for a belief system. I only need what is before me, and what is brought forward in its meaning to me. I don't have a need to apply what works for me, to you, or to anyone else, and it would seem we have that in common. What I am interested in, and will always pursue, is any discussion that enriches my understanding, or challenges my perceptions.
My morality, I suspect, is very similar to yours. I get all the support I need, however, from the story, and the metaphor and that is enough for me. I might say I believe that the natural world and all of its expressions is enough for me to find every bit of support I require. This would include, of course, the bible as an amazing work of literature, but also the Tao Te Ching, the Ramayana, The Bhagavad-Gita, Walt Whitman poetry, the ocean, Old Genesis with Peter Gabriel, trees, cats, and a great meal...etc. I don't believe in it, I am in it, it is right before me, not in another realm, not after-life...right here.
My faith is simple: The universe unfolds exactly as it should.
As a Rabi friend of mine is fond of saying: "Whatever floats your turtle."
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Quieting the Extremists
People of faith in America have sat by quietly while a minority of fundamentalists have run roughshod over their various religions.
It strikes me that Atheists should step up and shout down the minority of extremists that believe that people's religions require constant debunking and patronization. We could have the quiet moral certitude of our lives snatched away by folks that miss their high school debate team just a little too much.
Don't think that people of faith aren't hurt by this stuff. They really resent it and will overreact when cornered.
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For D Robert
If I didn't make it clear enough in my original letter, let me make it perfectly plain here and now: I have no patience with any sort of evangelical, fundamentalist anything. It doesn't have to be religion. It can be pretty much anything that's put itself in a box with knives and guns poked through the sides of said box, demanding with inflexible authority that the rest of us recognize that those inside the box possess the only truth regarding any issue you might want to name. Chief among these, however, for me anyway, is religious evangelicalism and anti-religious evangelicalism, two sides of the same coin, both trapped in the same box, flailing away at each other like good idiots. That's why, in my original letter, I said that fundamentalist believers (Christians, Muslims, whatever)deserve the beating they get. They do! Let there be no question about where I stand on that issue.
That being said, a reaction is just reactionary. If we are to rid the world of fundamentalism (or at least get some relief from it) there is no way in heaven or hell that an equal and opposite reaction is going to accomplish that. It is nothing more than the equivalent of our troop "surge" in Iraq or Israel and Hezbollah duking it out over the fence.
What causes you to believe (or should I say assume?) that I have "...been tolerating the murderous excesses of the other side for so long without a peep"? You certainly didn't learn that by reading letters I've written here at Salon, because I have been relentless in my prosecution of idiocy of all sorts, and that most definitely includes the Religious Right and all that led up to it, for a long (and long-winded) time now. And I don't just sit and write letters to Salon.
You've mistaken me for someone else, with the usual presumptuousness of those who believe inverting a thing is the same as setting it right.
As for your question as to how we manage to get the Other Half of the nation who believe the "world is no more than 10,000 years old" to grasp the urgency of, say, the global warming crisis, my answer is you become a missionary, and that if you don't do it right you get eaten. But if you approach people with the least bit of respect, try to understand how they got the way they are and help them learn to think, you would be amazed, I am quite certain, at the progress that can (as has been) made among my own tribe of wingnut hillbilly relatives concerning not only the "Sins of Scripture" (apologies to John Shelby Spong), but about the clear and present danger to the planet. They actually can be taught, but not by people who sneer down their noses at them and feed on their backwardness.
A little humility and a little less knee-jerking and you might be workable. You first need to realize that your presumptuousness about people you don't know is causing them to become more entrenched in their belief that you and your family are a threat to them. And that makes my job of bringing them to the debate at all a lot harder.
They're over there on the right. You're over there on the left. This is why so little is ever accomplished, at least without bloodshed.
And I apologize if I'm a little apoplectic about this house of mirrors in which we seem to be trapped. The Way Out is the Way In.