article:
Dawkins and Harris are not writing polite demurrals to the time-honored beliefs of billions; they are not issuing pleas for tolerance or moderation, but bone-rattling attacks on what they regard as a pernicious and outdated superstition.
(Yawn) Dawkins says it’s time “to get angry” with religion. My, my, such power he must hold. If Christianity couldn’t be destroyed by the Roman Empire, Arianism, Albigensianism, Attila the Hun, the Dark Ages, the Black Death, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Communism, humanism, Naziism, Marx, Darwin, or Freud, what gives these two the idea that they can influence a movement to wipe it out? Feh.
article:
Harris says he has turned down requests for the rights to translate “The End of Faith” into Arabic or Urdu. “I think it would be a death sentence for any translator,” he says.
Oh, yes, definitely the translator. Of course, the author himself would be perfectly safe, right? Mm-hm. Not even Harris himself believes that, or he wouldn’t have made the request that “the name of his current university not be publicized”. He’s not stupid. He knows what happened to Saloman Rushdie.
article:
But Dawkins, brilliant as he is, overlooks something any storefront Baptist preacher might have told him. “If there is no God, why be good?” he asks rhetorically, and responds: “Do you really mean the only reason you try to be good is to gain God’s approval and reward? That’s not morality, that’s just sucking up.”
Many a murder has been prevented not out of a fear of God, but out of a fear of being punished by the law. Of course, Western laws are by and large based on religious precepts, so there we are.
article:
He is correct that the social utility of religion doesn’t prove anything about the existence of God. But for all his erudition, he seems not to have spent much time among ordinary Christians, who could have told him what God has meant to them.
Rather like Hollywood liberals—a bit “out of touch”.
article:
As for the Bible, Harris, like the fundamentalists, prefers a literal reading. He quotes at length the passages in the Old and New Testaments dealing with how to treat slaves. Why, he asks, would anyone take moral instruction from a book that calls for stoning your children to death for disrespect, or for heresy, or for violating the Sabbath?
Ah, the common retreat into “The Awful Old Testament Response”. All that stuff in the Old Testament was just turrible, so therefore, religion must be false. Right, Doc. As idjicated as you are, you couldn’t come up with something a little more original?
article:
On the science Web site
Edge.org, the astronomer Carolyn Porco offers the subversive suggestion that science itself should attempt to supplant God in Western culture, by providing the benefits and comforts people find in religion: community, ceremony and a sense of awe. “Imagine congregations raising their voices in tribute to gravity, the force that binds us all to the Earth, and the Earth to the Sun, and the Sun to the Milky Way,” she writes.
The problem is, how did those astronomical bodies come into existance?
“Balls of dust and gas coalesced.”
Okay, but where did the gas and dust come from?
“It was left over from the origin of the universe.”
Okay, where did
that come from?
“We don’t know. We have no explanation for primary causes.”
So you can’t even explain the existance of what you observe, but we’re supposed to take your word for it that it wasn’t created by a higher being—or in the case above, we’re supposed to actually worship what we see, without inquiring as to how what we see came into existance?
Right, Doc.
