Hi 4Horsemen
I agree with you about “Shariah Law creep” in Turkey. Something similar seems to be happening in Indonesia.
Europe is interesting. Fertility rates among indigenous European populations are all below replacement level. Indigenous European populations are all either shrinking or will start shrinking within a few years.
However if you look more closely, religious Europeans, mainly Christians, tend to have more babies than secular Europeans. Thus what you could see is a rising population of Christian Europeans even while the indigenous European population as a whole declines. The demographer, Eric Kaufmann, summarises these trends in “
Breeding for God”.
Kaufmann’s book,
Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Religiosity, Fertility and Politics, is well worth reading.
You can see a
debate on the topic here.
Personally I think atheists are a threatened species.
I am not an atheist. I have no idea whether there exists a being or entity who could be described as the creator of the universe. Nor do I ever expect to know because I cannot think of any experiment or observation that could settle the matter.
However I am what might be called a “scriptural sceptic” which is to say I don’t think any of humanity’s “sacred” books are the direct “word” of the creator of the universe.
The koran can be disposed of easily enough. It is a central tenet of Islam that an angel, Gibril, transmitted a message from “Allah” verbatim to a seventh century merchant-warrior called Muhammad over a 22 year period. Muslims believe that the koran available from any Islamic bookshop, when correctly recited, reproduces the exact message, word for word, syllable for syllable, phoneme for phoneme that “Allah” allegedly transmitted to Muhammad via Gibril 1400 years ago.
However this is a creator who flunks science 101. He cannot even get the basic facts about mammalian reproduction and geology right.
Muslims, of course, will say that we poor uneducated kafirs cannot understand the koran on our own. Only “scholars” who have devoted decades of their lives to studying the “science” of the ahadith and the discipline of koranic interpretation can truly explain the meaning of each passage. Once the correct rules of interpretation are applied, so Muslims assert, we see that the koran actually anticipated the results of western science. They even trot out a few tame “scientists” such as
Keith Moore to back up their claims of “scientific miracles” in the koran.
The trouble with this approach is that with enough clever “interpretation” I can make even the Harry Potter stories sound like profound scripture. All it needs is about 100 words of “interpretation” for every word in the stories. Only people determined to believe in Islam could find this approach credible. Anyone with an open mind sees immediately that this is mumbo-jumbo.
I also cannot imagine the creator of the universe saying something along these lines?
The bible is different. The Catholic Church does not assert that the creator of the universe dictated the bible verbatim. Rather the Church teaches that the texts were written by humans who were in some sense divinely inspired. That is at least possible whereas the Muslim claims about the koran are not credible.
The Old Testament is interesting because in it we see how the Jews’ understanding of the nature of the divine
evolved over the millennia. The deity described in the first five books (the Torah) comes across as a stern, unyielding, unmerciful taskmaster interested only in unquestioning obedience.
But by the time of Isaiah we see this:
According to Isaiah this is God saying “ritual obedience and meaningless sacrifices are not enough. I want justice”.
The entire book of Amos is a passionate plea for what we would today call “social justice”. Atheists, fundamentalist Christians and ultra-orthodox Jews are all remarkably good at not seeing how the Jewish understanding of God evolved from the time of Abraham to the time of Amos.
Notice that Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Habakuk and all the rest are
Jews telling Jews how they are falling short in virtue. That is what makes them
real prophets. A real prophet speaks truth to power. A real prophet is not afraid to break with his own people.
The New Testament then takes us in a new direction. It is the idea of God as a “suffering servant”.
If you look at the bible from the time of Abraham to the time of the Apostles you see a stunning evolution of understanding.
Is this text divinely inspired?
I don’t know. Personally I doubt it. But it is certainly inspired and inspiring. It cannot simply be dismissed as claptrap.
(non conformists on dad’s side, CofE on mums).
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