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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
There hasn't been a truly mainstream piece of anti-religion media in ages. Agnostics like me and Bill Maher help make up a huge but mostly silent group who have been made to sit quietly while others trumpet their pro-God views loudly and, often, obnoxiously. This film tells those people NOT to confuse our silence for agreement. We, too, have a voice now, and the truth is on our side -- truth meaning facts, not that sacrosanct but unprovable concept of Truth -- and it's hard to imagine a more important time in history to make a case against organized religion.
Really, Andrew? "Ubiquitous"?
I live in Alabama, not Area 51...although I can understand why some would mistake the two.
Not yet seen a magic trick I believed.
I've felt spiritual, maybe, at a Springsteen concert, but in the sense of blood rising up in my skin, sharing the vibrations of a loud gathering of similarly weird sort-of-poetic cynical-romantic folks, not in some feeling that there's anything more on the other side of the grave than dust.
It's sad but good to assume this is all there is. Less time wasted looking for something you can never have and more time grabbing on to stuff.
Endorphins, orgasms, a long swim, a spontaneous road trip, Richard Thompson solos, Guinness served right, cheap or otherwise wine...some things can leave you feeling quite at one with the universe, for lack of a better metaphor, for a period of time.
But the rest is wishful thinking. Which is kind of an oxymoron. Like unchallenged faith.
I would say you are in the right line of thinking when it comes to war/religion.
However, the I would say that religion plays a very large secondary role.
Religion is used to divide people. This is built in. If one group of people believe in God X and the other group believes in God Y, they have made themselves into subsets of humanity.
It divides in the same way that "race" or "ethnicity" divides. These divisions are the kindling of war and hate. What makes religion such a big problem in this regard, is that it can divide in an even bigger and deeper way.
When Group X is taught to believe that Group Y is "evil", follows "evil", or at the very least is sinful and wrong...it is not conductive to unity and peace.
In some cases this leads to creating ethnic wars...that are based on religion. As was the case in Yugoslavia, in WW2 and Today. A Serb and a Bosnian were the same thing, they were both Serbs....but one group of serbs was orthodox while the other group of serbs was muslim. If you were serbian and muslim, you became Bosnian. So while the war was "ethnic", the only reason they were even seperated to begin with, was different religions. They had the same language, food, costumes, you name it....but were separated by religion, and that made it possiable to create the US vs. THEM needed for mass murder.
I remember reading a news article at the time that said a group of Bosnian Serbs (See how silly this is, they are serbs, who are orthodox, who are from Bosnia. As opposed to Serbs who are muslim and from Bosnia who become bosnians), had raped a woman, and told her that "she would have Serbian Babies". Think of how silly that is.... Are the babies going to come out orthodox?
A similar thing happened in WW2. The Nazis were experts at exploiting religion, to meet their more racist/imperial goals.
They created Catholic SS units and muslim ss in Croatia and Bosnia to kill Orthodox Serbs, because the Serbs rebelled against the Axis. The Italians were Catholic...The Croats were Catholic...so the Italians said you fight with us ("fellow catholics") against those scum orthodox serbs.
Today, as though history, there are more examples of this tribalism than can be counted.
Think of how much more easy it is to get otherwise rational people to want to fight each other, when you divide them into competing tribes. When it becomes "Those darm MUSLIM arabs" or "those CHRISTIAN americans", makes it a lot more easy to kill the evil other.
What makes all this tribalism so heart breaking for non believers, is that it is over nothing. It is over imagination and stories.
It is not just the occasional killing in the name of that is so heartbreaking and counter productive to humanity;
It is the deep seeded separation.... Which is all the worst, since there is no good reason for it.
owned slaves, would one be so willing to emulate him in that too?
Thomas Jefferson was by no means an atheist, rather, he was obsessed with the Bible and devoted to what he took to be (mistakenly in my opinion) his version of Jesus.
And Bill Maher, why is it that everyone who questions the reliability of the gospels forgets the letters of St. Paul, which were written in the 60s? I mean the original 60s as in six zero A.D. We can question it, as we should everything, but let's not ignore what evidence there is of the resurrection merely by pointing to the failings of some of the kooks who believe in it. There are many places to start, but one is here
http://www.jamesgregory.org/tom_wright.php
(please cut and paste and listen to this lecture. You may not agree, but it is worth your time)
I don't buy the supernatural, but the spiritual? That's fairly common and has been for millenia. Countless books have been written on the subject in all sorts of languages from all over the globe by people who adhere to many different religions. The problem is that, in order to find it you have to seek it, and in a very humble, devoted and consistent way. I don't know who I find the more astonishing, atheists who swear there is no god without ever doing the spiritual work that everyone who's ever found god says you have to do, or phonies like Bush who claim to have found god one morning during a particularly bad hangover.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
